One danger we all face when purchasing a water filter: It doesn’t remove all the things we want it to remove. Yep, this can definitely happen to people if they do not have a thorough water quality analysis performed prior to purchasing a water filter for their home or place of business.

Today’s question comes to us from someone in NYC (Brooklyn to be more precise) who has apparently installed a water filtration system in their home… but still has ‘floating white stuff’ in their water.

M. Elbaz wrote, “How can i check if water has copeds or bugs or parasytes? I use filter in Brooklyn ans still see white things floating around
Please advise asap”

Quite frankly, this question has a number of possible answers, but from what you have described, one of many situations may have resulted in the floating particulates you described:

1. You have installed a water filter with too high a porosity rating, meaning the contaminants you want to filter out have too small a size for your filter to remove them.

    

2. The installation of your water filtration system requires adjustment because some part of the unit is allowing unfiltered water to bypass the filtering process — or the actual filter itself has started to break down.

    

3. Since we don’t know what class of filter you have installed (i.e. undersink, countertop, whole house, etc.) we will just throw this one out there for the heck of it: Often when people install filters that will still allow water to pass though existing faucets they fail to replace the screens in their faucets.

   Studies have shown that screens in faucets, if left unchanged for too long, will tend to collect specific deposits of contaminants in contaminated water — and then potentially release those contaminants into the water stream at a later time.

    

4. Floating white particulates make us think more of mineral deposits than parasites, but it should still trigger an alarm that something isn’t quite right. Perhaps, and those kind of goes back to the last bullet point, the lines in your home post-filter have collected mineral deposits over the years and those now appear in your water?

As for your question regarding the possibility that your water contains parasites, bacteria, etc., contact a certified water testing laboratory in your area and have them perform a thorough analysis of your water.

Steer clear of water treatment companies offering ‘free in-home testing’. Why? Simple: For one, no in-home test kit we have ever found can provide the thoroughness of testing required if you suspect parasites or other unwanted biological contaminants exist in your water supply.

Besides… a person from a water treatment company going to your home has one goal in mind: to make commission off the sale of a (potentially useless or otherwise unqualified) water treatment system.

Need help finding a qualified water testing laboratory in your area? Take a look through the EPA’s listing of State Certified drinking water laboratories. The laboratories on this list have passed rigorous qualification programs designed to weed out labs whose testing programs lack what it takes to accurately and professionally analyze drinking water samples.

Does that mean at-home bacteria test kits such as the WaterWorks™ Bacteria Water Test Kit have no purpose? Nonsense! Periodic testing for coliform bacteria — especially for well owners since no one government agency checks the quality of their water on a regular basis — will always make sense.

Important factors to think about when it comes to deciding when and/or how often to test the quality of your water:

• For Well Owners: Changes in weather patterns (i.e. excessive rain, long periods without rain, flooding, etc.) can have adverse effects on the quality of water coming out of your well.

• For City/Municipal Water Customers: Anything can happen to the miles of underground piping between the water treatment facility and no one will ever investigate until people start to get sick.

Performing regular spot checks on your water’s quality may allow you to detect potential problems well in advance of anyone becoming ill.

“It’s your water, your health… and ultimately your LIFE!”

Every so often we receive questions from readers who ask something along the lines of, “What do most people ask about?”

Seemed odd at first (several years ago), but after getting asked the same thing so many times we eventually came to the conclusion that a good number of people really and truly don’t know what questions they ought to have about the quality of their drinking water.

Therefore, for your reading pleasure we will now give a list of the 10 most popular topics on Water Testing Blog for the month of August (2011):

1. Free Chlorine, Total Chlorine and Combined Chlorine
    
2. Testing for Fluoride in Water
    
3. Converting Hardness: Grains per Gallon to Parts per Million
    
4. What is DPD?
    
5. Chlorine Testing: Drinking Water vs. Pool Water
    
6. Simple Chlorine Testing Meter
    
7. Dirty Pool Water Can Make You Very Sick
    
8. Testing for Chlorine in Drinking Water
    
9. Lead in Soil
    
10. Private Well Water and Natural Gas Drilling

In no way does the above list begin to scratch the surface of what curious folks read on our site, but it may help you decide what questions YOU want answered… and if you come up with a question or topic you’d like us to address, send it to us using our submit a comment/question form.

It did, however, kind of shock us that hydraulic fracturing (aka: fracking), a means of extracting natural gas from shale buried deep beneath the Earth’s surface, came in so low on the list given the amount of (bad) publicity hydraulic fracturing has received in the past few years.

We also found it somewhat odd that bacteria in water did not make a single appearance in the list but then again, most folks in the United States have city/municipal water and make the assumption that city/municipal water couldn’t ever contain something as common as bacteria — and that, friends, can sometimes become a dangerous assumption to make!

Unlike many sites out there who shy away from posting opinions that differ from their own, we prefer to embrace the difference of opinion as one of two things, or both:

1. As a chance to learn more about a topic and alter our views if necessary because we found out new information.

2. As a chance to learn more about a topic and provide additional information we may not have already known about the topic here on the Water Testing Blog.

Today’s difference of opinion came to us from a gentleman by the name of ‘Keith’ who wrote, “You stated ‘Radon gas in homes can wipe out whole families and the victims never even know the gas existed before it happens. ‘ This is total B.S. I have studied Radiation effects in people since 1969 and there is no known case of this ocurrance. Prove it.”

First of all, thank you, Keith for contacting us.

Upon reading our own statement, perhaps we may have over-dramatized things a tiny bit, but then again, perhaps not. According to a page on the United States Environmental Protection Agency web site (www.epa.gov/radon/pubs/citguide.html), “Radon is estimated to cause about 21,000 lung cancer deaths per year, according to EPA’s 2003 Assessment of Risks from Radon in Homes (EPA 402-R-03-003).”

The numbers of deaths from other causes are taken
from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s
2005-2006 National Center for Injury Prevention
and Control Report and 2006 National Safety Council Reports.

The EPA’s web site goes on to say, “Radon is estimated to cause many thousands of deaths each year. That’s because when you breathe air containing radon, you can get lung cancer. In fact, the Surgeon General has warned that radon is the second leading cause of lung cancer in the United States today. Only smoking causes more lung cancer deaths. If you smoke and your home has high radon levels, your risk of lung cancer is especially high.”

So, while radon doesn’t run up into homes with both barrels of a shotgun blazing as it takes human life, it does seem to kill quite a few people — with both the USEPA and Surgeon General of the United States in agreement that radon poses a significant health risk to humans.

Today’s inquiry came from ‘Bill’ and it seems as though Bill has a bit of a bone to pick with fluoride in his drinking water and wants to do two things, both of which nearly bring tears to our eyes:

1. Bill wants to test the fluoride level in his water before it goes into his water filter. As awe have said time and time again, without a baseline scan of your water’s quality you will undoubtedly run the risk of selecting the incorrect tools for cleaning up your water.

2. Then, Bill wants to test the fluoride levels in the water after it leaves his water filter to make sure the filter did its job. Continual monitoring of one’s filtered water quality gives real-time performance data on one’s chosen water improvement device(s).

Enough of our words, though, and let’s here from Bill himself: “I am looking for a fluoride test–I am installing a filter to remove fluoride–and want to know what levelis presecn Please advise–the page on your website says to use the eXact Micro 7+ Water Testing Meter but the product description says nothing about it being used for fluoride”

None of us here at Water Testing Blog have control over the content posted on the sites of merchants who sell the eXact Micro 7+ water testing meter… but we can assure you that the meter does have the ability to test for fluoride in drinking water.

As a direct result of your inquiry, Bill, we checked on the meter manufacturer’s web site for the current version of the eXact Micro 7+ water testing meter manual and on page 19 of the document you will find instructions on how to use their meter to test fluoride levels in drinking water.

As of 8/17/11, the date contained in the manual’s file name, the eXact Micro 7+ detects levels of fluoride in water as low as 0.1 ppm and as high as 1.1 ppm. As with any test procedure, use of proper dilution techniques would allow for the quantification of higher fluoride levels if needed.

Keep in mind, though, that the basic eXact Micro 7+ kit does not come with the necessary fluoride reagent strips. You will find those, along with many other optional reagentstrips for testing a bunch of other water quality parameters listed on the eXact Micro 7+ ReagentStrip page.