Our municipal water supply is know for hard water and chlorine odor, due to the water source and age of our water distribution system. This was a big change from our previous home, and we needed to do something about it. Running the water in our new shower enclosure generated a substantial odor, and while it isn’t dangerous, it is annoying. What to do?
We opted to go with an Aquasana whole house system with pre-filter, carbon filter, softener, post-filter, and finally UV light. We were fortunate to have room adjacent to the water inlet for our house, and in the interest of time used PEX piping.
Our system is rated for 10 years, 1,000,000 gallons of water, but how do you keep track? A water meter of course! This gives us an easy way to check the filter life, and to separate our water consumption between our 3/4 acre and our indoor use.
We change the filters regularly, and here is a side by side. The pre filter is the tall one, and this is a 20 micron filter. The short one is the post filter, and it catches carbon and other stuff down to 0.3 microns.
The pre-filter cartridge before cleaning.
Sand and metal that was too large to embed into the filter element. This stuff goes in your wash, cooking, cleaning, you name it…
Was it worth it? We feel it was worth every penny. How hard is our water? So hard that the previous owner “gifted” us 6 bottles of lime/scale/rust remover. All of the water fixtures we removed exhibit extensive scale. Since installing this setup and installing all new fixtures throughout the entire house, we haven’t needed to de scale once in nearly two years. There is zero chlorine odor in shower, which makes it extra relaxing.
We have since added a Z-Wave outlet to remotely control the UV sterilizer, since it consumes 100 watts continuous. We are not in absolute need of it unless there is a boil order.