Important “Stuff”
(Take ten minutes out of your life to read this.
It’s important…and it’s worth your time.)
As most of our customers are aware, AMAC Water Products is not your typical bottled water distributor. The owners of AMAC, Al and Sue McDonald, consider themselves to be in the health, or wellness, industry rather than in the beverage industry. And that’s for a very good reason. Sue almost died in 1995 when her immune system “crashed” after an exposure to one household chemical too many…and it took her years to become functional again. Along the path to recovering her health, Sue and Al (who is a chemist by degree) discovered the critical importance of drinking world-class spring water bottled in glass. (Actually, one of the doctors instrumental in Sue’s recovery told her to drink Mountain Valley and to avoid drinking out of plastic.) The water made such a difference to Sue’s health (as well as to Al’s and their dog’s) that after a couple of years of being customers, they approached the existing distributor, made him an offer he couldn’t refuse, and have spent the last ten years telling people about this incredible water and its effects on health.
Today we would like to talk about another type of water: your household “tap” water…and why it’s so important to filter it. Along with this, we would also like the opportunity to explain why filtering your water is far preferable to installing either a water softening system or a reverse osmosis system. So please bear with us while we explain the differences. (This is information that we wish someone had told us years ago and we appreciate the opportunity to pass it along.)
It seems that we have done a rather extraordinary job of contaminating our ground water in this country and most fairly astute people have long ago switched to drinking bottled spring water rather than drinking the municipal water that enters our homes. Municipalities add chlorine to water to kill bacteria and other unwanted organisms…and it works. However, what most of us do not realize is that after the average shower we end up with as much chlorine inside us as if we had just drunk one-half gallon of chlorinated water. This happens because we absorb the chlorine through our skin and through inhalation. And chlorine (along with a group of chemicals called trihalomethanes, formed when chlorine reacts with organic material in water) is a particularly nasty chemical. Chlorine not only kills the bacteria in your tap water, but, once inside you, it continues killing bacteria…beneficial bacteria that your body needs.
We consider the use of chlorinated water to be low-dose poisoning…and we don’t use this term lightly. Chlorine is a poison. This toxic chemical causes the most household poisonings in the U.S. and it ranks first in industrial injuries and deaths. It is a known carcinogen and should never be in the water that we drink, bathe in, wash our produce in, or spend any length of time with our hands in…as do so many women who spend any length of time in the kitchen.
Sherry Rogers, M.D., one of the preeminent doctors in the world specializing in environmental medicine, offers some interesting insight about chlorine and about one of the ways it is so detrimental to health. According to Dr. Rogers, once chlorine enters the body, it pits tiny holes in the blood vessel walls. In an effort to heal those tiny holes, your body applies a “band-aid” to them…and that band-aid is cholesterol. Therefore, the more chlorine in the body, the higher the level of cholesterol can be. (Which may be one of the reasons why some people with high cholesterol can never seem to get their cholesterol levels lowered, despite cholesterol-lowering drugs. As long as they continue bathing in chlorinated water, the cholesterol levels will continue to build.)
According to Dr. Rogers, chlorine is a significant contributor to hardening of the arteries (atherosclerosis) and, hence, one of the leading contributors to heart disease. As the cholesterol continues to build, the passage through the blood vessels becomes narrower, and blood pressure increases. When this narrowing becomes severe, blockages requiring bypass surgery often occur. (Heart disease, until it was recently eclipsed by cancer, has been the number one cause of death in the United States for decades.)
So we at AMAC think it’s critical to get the chlorine (and trihalomethanes) out of our tap water. How do you do it? The two most effective ways are reverse osmosis and carbon filtration. (A water softening system doesn’t touch chlorine unless a carbon filter is added to it…and then it’s still not very effective since several carbon filters are required to adequately filter the water [and these are not usually included with a water softening system]. More on this later.)
We are firm believers in carbon filtration (vs reverse osmosis or water softeners)…and we’d like to tell you why. Here are the primary differences among the systems.
Reverse Osmosis
Reverse osmosis works by forcing the water, through the use of high pressure, through a plastic membrane. This membrane removes a lot of contaminants, including chlorine. However, in addition to removing the “bad stuff,” it also removes the “good stuff,” namely the minerals in the water. The end result is that you are left with an acidic water, which, while it may be good for your household pipes, is not at all necessarily good for your body. (In fact, we believe that it’s not good at all.) Reverse osmosis is very seldom used as a whole-house system because it is extraordinarily wasteful. Due to the high pressure used, not all of the water is able to be pushed through the membrane; instead, much of it backs up and then must be released through a drain. Usually several gallons of water are wasted for every gallon of water that makes it through the membrane. Because of such inefficiency, most reverse osmosis systems are used only as under-the-sink filtration…which still leaves the problem of showering with chlorinated water unaddressed (not to mention having to launder your clothes in chlorinated water….let us tell you how nice it is to wear soft clothes that weren’t washed in chlorine!).
Water Softeners
These are our least favorite systems. Water softening systems work primarily by removing the minerals in the water and replacing them with sodium. The sodium makes the water feel soft and the lack of minerals is easier on your home’s water pipes than is water with minerals in it. However, since this “softened” water isn’t good to drink due to the high sodium content, manufacturers of water softeners usually add a reverse osmosis system at the sink to filter out the sodium before you drink the water. The problem that is not being addressed, once again, is the water that you bathe in. Unless significant carbon filtration is included with the water softening system, the water that you bathe in is still chlorinated, only this time it is also loaded with sodium, much of which will be absorbed during each shower or bath. (We wonder how many doctors who put their patients on low sodium diets ask them if they use a water softener.)
Carbon Filtration
This is by far our favorite method of removing chlorine, trihalomethanes and other chemicals from water. By filtering water, through the use of several charcoal filters, one leaves the minerals intact while getting rid of the chemicals...and the difference is life-changing. People truly cannot believe the difference after their first shower in properly filtered water. Your skin and hair are softer; many skin problems disappear (that dry, white, flaky, itchy skin you have after your shower is skin that has been killed by the chlorine in the water), and you just plain feel so much better. The icing on the cake is that the long-term benefits are even greater.
If you’ve stuck with us this far, we’re going to assume that we’ve piqued your interest in a whole-house carbon filtration system. Let us now tell you about the one we sell…and why we think it’s the best you can buy (it’s also less expensive than most whole-house filtration systems).
When Sue’s immune system “crashed,” she and Al were fortunate to have been put in touch with doctors who are knowledgeable about the role that chemicals are playing in our health problems (and it’s a huge role). The end result is that one of the things the McDonalds did early on was to purchase a state-of-the-art whole-house water filtration system. It made a significant difference. However, Al, after examining the system, said “This could have been designed to be much more effective.” And he was right. So he set about designing a better system, which AMAC then began offering to its customers…to rave reviews.
Why is this system better?
What makes this system so much better than others on the market is simply this: The vast majority of whole-house systems have the carbon filters aligned parallel to each other, side by side. Al’s system is designed with the filters in a series, with one filter following another. Here’s the easy-to-understand difference.
In a standard parallel system with four filters side-by-side, the incoming water comes in through the main pipe and is divided equally among the filters, with approximately 25% of the water going through each filter. The carbon filters then remove 60-85% of the chlorine and other contaminants (the warmer the water, the less effective carbon is, so during the summer months fewer contaminants will be removed), so the water that enters your home after going through the four-filter parallel system still contains roughly 15-40% of the initial chlorine, trihalomethanes (which are carcinogenic and are in many ways actually worse than chlorine), VOCs, heavy metals, etc.
With AMAC’s system, four filters are aligned in a series, one after the other. This means that all of the water passes through each of the filters. The initial filter is an inexpensive pleated sediment filter located in the first filter housing. This filter protects the three carbon filters that follow it by catching most of the rust, dirt and sludge from the municipal source. (If the water pressure drops, you simply replace the first filter.) As the water passes through the second filter, the carbon removes 60-85% of the contaminants. The third filter then removes an additional 60-85% of what made it through the second filter; and the fourth filter removes an additional 60-85%. By the time the water has traveled through all four filters, no more than 1-5% of the contaminants remain vs. 15-40% that remain when using a standard system. And what a difference it makes!
This system is offered in two sizes, depending upon the demands of the household. The medium-sized 10-inch system is generally acceptable for a household of four, while larger families would do better with the larger 20-inch system. In either system, the use of low-cost polypropylene filter housings for the first three filters allows the system to be affordable while the fourth filter housing is a stainless-steel “polishing” filter that cleans up any off-gassing that occurred from the plastic filters upstream. (Note: if the plumbing in the house is plastic, the use of this stainless-steel filter is negated.)
Either system is easily installed by your local plumber and is usually placed at the point where water service enters the house.
What is the cost?
One of the best features of this system, in addition to its remarkable effectiveness, is the cost. The standard 10-inch system is only $699 plus tax and installation while the larger 20-inch system is $980.
So give yourself and your family one of the best gifts you could ever give: clean water. For more information or to order a whole-house water filtration system for your home, call AMAC Water Products at 713-937-8630 and ask for Al McDonald. He has designed what we believe to be the best water filtration system on the market…and it’s one you’ll want in your home. It truly is the perfect gift for your family…and the water in your bathtub will be a gorgeous shade of aqua instead of Houston’s typical yellow-brown. You’ll be able to see…and feel…the difference. Immediately. It’s dramatic...and it’s great for your health. Please feel free to call us with any questions you might have.