Lately, we have been receiving frequent inquiries regarding treating lead in home drinking water. Generally, lead is not found in high concentrations at water treatment plants. So how does lead get in your home’s drinking water? There are a number of ways that your drinking water comes in contact with lead. Many service lines are still lead pipes. The service line runs from the water main in the street to your house. Obviously, most homeowners do not want to incur the expense of replacing the service line. Lead can also be introduced from lead pipes within your house, lead-based solder and plumbing fixtures which predate the Safe Drinking Water Act.
In any discussion of water treatment, they are two core methods of contaminant removal: Point of Entry (POE) and Point of Use (POU). POE involves treating your home’s water in its entirety. POU indicates that the water is only treated at a single point of use. It would appear that POE is preferred but that is not necessarily true.
Reverse Osmosis (RO) is the most effective method of water purification. This process will remove between 95-98% of all contaminants in water including lead. Whole-home reverse osmosis is an option but is fairly costly and requires a significant-sized holding tank. A POU reverse osmosis system can be a cost-effective method of providing purified drinking water to a designated spigot in your kitchen Unfortunately, the amount of purified water available at any time is limited by either a 2 or 10-gallon holding tank. Plenty of drinking water will be available however you may not have enough water for cooking and washing vegetables.
Specialized POE lead removal filters are available and can treat the water in the whole house. Please note lead filtration is not as effective as RO. Pure Water Technology prefers to pair a 6-stage POU reverse osmosis system with a 2-stage POE filtration system. The POE system affords a layer of protection from lead for all bathroom sinks (ie. brushing teeth), bathing water, and general kitchen use.
To learn more about our Water Safe POE/POU systems contact us at info@purewaterwny.com