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Why Does My Water Taste Bad???


We get a lot of phone calls from home owners asking, “Why does my water taste so bad?”  There can be many reasons why your city treated water taste bad and one of the biggest reasons is caused by your local water treatment plant.  Along with taking many things out of our local drinking water, your treatment plant has to add chemicals which disinfects the water and kills many microorganisms that can make you sick.  The strongest tasting chemical in your water can be a byproduct called Chloramine.
  • Chloramine: Chlorine / Ammonia
Cause of Bad Taste
Chloramine is a byproduct produced by your municipal water treatment plant by combining ammonia with chlorine.  This is a common way to treat our drinking water but it often leaves a bad or “pool like” taste in our drinking water.  When this process is performed at our local municipality, the 3 different things that are produced are inorganic chloramines, called monochloramine, dichloramine and trichloramine.  Monochloramine is stable in drinking water with a level of pH between 7 & 9.  When the chlorine concentration increases and the pH is reduced, it can form problematic dichloride and trichlormine.  Both of these are less effective at disinfection as monochloramine.  For this reason the EPA defines the levels safe which utilities strive to ensure that only monochloramines are used for disinfection.

Why Our Local Water Plants Use Chloramines instead of Chlorine.
The reason our municipalities use chloramines instead of only chlorine is the sustainability of chloramines vs chlorine.  Chlorine can lose its effectiveness as a disinfectant over long distances.  This means the long journey water has to travel from the water plant to your home can be less effective than chloramine.  Chloramine also produces fewer disinfection byproducts than chlorine, including trihalomethanes (TTHMs) and more.  These byproducts are a natural result of organic matter reacting to disinfectants.  So it works well as an effective disinfectant and ensures you are at less of a risk for exposure to disinfection byproducts.

How Does Chloramines Affect My Families Health?
When chloramines are used by your local water treatment plant, the levels have to be kept below the maximum contaminant level or (MCL) of 4 milligrams per liter (mg/L) or 4 parts per million (ppm).  When kept at the correct levels, chloramine does not pose a significant health risk to you or your family but without this added disinfectant, your water could be extremely detrimental to you well-being.

How do I get the Chlorine / Chloramine Taste Our of My Water??
Most standard charcoal filters are designed to remove bad taste and odor from our water but only for a very limited time.  These filters do not have the surface area needed to absorb or chemically capture these unpleasant tastes for extended times.  Think of carbon as a sponge which absorbs the bad tastes and odors. After a period of time that sponge (carbon) will become saturated to the point that it can hold no more, after this happens the water will just pass over it.  Our carbon filter will not pull out any more odors, which is why many factory installed refrigerator filters only last a few months, depending on water use.

Why Should You Get a More Effective Water Filter Then A Standard Carbon Filter?
  • Time
  • Money
  • Easy
Save Time, Save Money and make your life Easy.  That is where Okey Water filter products bring water filtration to the next level.  As you can see using a carbon filter is very important for better tasting water.  Okey Water’s multi-media filter uses the standard carbon along with its special Z-1 Process media.  This multimedia filter lasts up to 6 X longer than just a standard carbon based filter.  You spend less money, spend less time and make your water purification easy. 

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