Anyone that has taken the initiative to install a water filter or water purification device/system in their home deserves a bit of praise… and those that continue to take an interest in the quality of their water after installing a water treatment system deserve even MORE for their efforts.

As an example, ‘J. Mampilly’ from India installed a system and now seeks to determine if he has installed the correct unit. He asked,

I would like to know about how i can confirm the effectiveness of my water purifier. Labs in India that can certify and throw light on the camparative quality of water before and after using a water purifier. Thank You

Unfortunately we do not have familiarity with water testing laboratories in India and cannot directly assist with this situation. We can suggest, however, that you contact your local health department and ask them for a list of certified water testing laboratories in your area.

Coliform Bacteria Test Kit

Before…

In order to know what type of filter or what filtering capabilities you should purchase, invest (yes, we said invest) in a thorough water analysis performed by a qualified water testing laboratory. Here, again, we suggest contacting your local board of health and asking them, for a list of certified drinking water testing labs. Alternatively, or if no labs exist in your immediate vicinity, you can use the services of accredited water testing companies such as National Testing Labs.

No matter what, though, always have your water tested BEFORE deciding on a water treatment system. Oh, and one more thing: Don’t think for one second that a salesperson doing an in-home water test has the same water testing tools or qualifications as a reputable water testing laboratory. Remember: 99% of all salespeople attempt to sell things and not accurately analyze a situation — especially if accurately diagnosing a situation could cost them a sale!

And after!

As ‘J. Mampilly’ has done, we should ALL take an interest in comparing the quality of water that comes out of our water filter systems. Only then will we know if the money we invested in (not spent on!) a quality drinking water filter system performs as expected.

Testing water quality beforehand gives us not only an idea of what we need to filter out of our water, but also a checklist of water quality parameters to monitor post-filtration. Should follow up water testing reveal that these ‘issues’ did not get corrected or suddenly show up months after the installation of a water system, perhaps the water filter has stopped working or never really worked properly in the first place and needs service of some sort.

And in conclusion…

Many people go through life ‘deaf, dumb and blind’ when it comes to the quality of their water — until an (initially) unexplainable health problem pops into their life. Then, and unfortunately sometimes too late, those same people get very interested in the quality of their water and want to punish or otherwise penalize others for allowing them to consume tainted, polluted and/or contaminated drinking water.

Although we feel much sympathy for the victims of poor quality drinking water, most of us here in the United States have the ability to at least once every great while perform basic testing for critical water quality parameters such as heavy metals (i.e. lead, mercury, copper, iron, etc.), coliform bacteria, pesticides (i.e. atrazine and simazine), chlorine levels (free and/or total), total hardness, total dissolved solids, and many others.

Many times the contaminants in a water supply will have no taste, carry no odor and not appear before the naked eye. Only testing will alert you to their presence.

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!

Today’s question comes from ‘Mohamed’ who asked, “How much should be the free chlorine in the irrigation water? We are treating sewage water and sending it to farm lands. What is the international standard of the irrigation water in respect to free chlorine?”

We do not know of an International Standard for free chlorine levels in irrigation water but we do know that most States in the US require wastewater treatment plants to neutralize TOTAL chlorine levels before discharging water into the environment and that wastewater treatment facilities must test for total chlorine residuals in their effluent streams on a regular basis to make sure the chlorine concentrations stay virtually non-existent.

Why worry about chlorine in the environment?

If allowed to enter the environment chlorine can and will effectively kill or damage biological organisms that it comes in contact with. In great enough concentrations chlorine will wipe out all plant life in a body of water as well as any animals or fish in the water.

We use chlorine to render safe (i.e. KILL) biological contaminants in our drinking water and if released into a natural habitat the chlorine will render safe (i.e. KILL) any and all plant an animal life until it loses its effectiveness.

Testing for free & total chlorine?

Whether you prefer test strips, wet chemistry kits or a water testing meter… you have plenty of choices when it comes to testing for both free and total chlorine levels in drinking and treated waste water.

Do not let a clever sales pitch or catchy marketing jingle fool you. Many common drinking water filter systems do NOTHING to remove or reduce chloramines in water. They simply lack the technology in their filtration media to do so.

We mentioned this filter (the Pentek ChlorPlus) in the past and now feel the need to mention it again since we continue to receive inquiries from people asking why their water filters fail to remove all of the chlorine smell from their water.

The majority of water filters readily available in the marketplace do NOT remove chloramines, also known as combined chlorine. Most carbon filters remove free chlorine only. It takes a specialized type of filter like the Pentek ChlorPlus to cleanse water of unwanted chloramines.

Does my water contain chloramines?

Whether your municipal water system uses free chlorine or chloramines as its primary sanitizing agent we cannot say, but in either case your water will certainly contain chloramines. Unsure why? Take a look at this brief tutorial on free chlorine, total chlorine and combined chlorine.

That’s just a cartridge… What sort of housing does it go in?

A very keen observation followed by a very good question! The Pentek ChlorPlus filter for chloramine removal fits in most standard sized 10″ (by 2.5″) filter housings including, but not limited to, models manufactured by companies like Pentek, Ametek, US Filter, Bruner, American Plumber, Cuno, Filterite, Keystone, Water Resources and most Harmsco filter housings.

As always before purchasing a replacement cartridge for your water filter system, check, double check and TRIPLE check to make sure your housing will accommodate the filter cartridge you wish to buy!

As we expected, the number of questions we received recently about swimming pool water has definitely increased. Today’s inquiry comes from a Water Testing Blog reader who hails from Pakistan and he/she asked:

Dear Sir/Madam,
hope you will be fine.i need some information regarding digital chlorine tester for swimming pool water .i read about extech cl200 testing metre.kindly send me the literature and price for it .
thanks
an early response is appreciable
farhan

Now before any of you go and criticize this person’s grammatical skills when typing in English, think more about the person’s commitment to keeping a proper chlorine level in swimming pool and the time it took to submit a question to this site.

WE commend ‘Farhan’ for his/her efforts and for transcending the language barrier to ask a question about proper chlorine testing in pool water.

On the topic of the “Extech 1200C” for chlorine testing in pool water, we took a look at the ExTech web site and did not find a meter in the chlorine/fluoride in water detection called the ‘Extech 1200C’… so we found ourselves a bit puzzled by your question.

We DID, however, see the ExTech CL200 Chlorine Testing Meter which uses Extech (CL203) Exstik ExTab™ Chlorine Reagent Tablets, a undoubtedly a proprietary blend of DPD-1 & DPD-3 reagents, to test for ONLY total chlorine concentrations in water.

The obvious problem we see with this meter for pool water testing, despite its USEPA credentials for total chlorine testing (in waste water), deal with the meter’s INability to test for free chlorine concentrations in water.

Proper Pool Water Testing Requires Free AND Total Chlorine Testing!

That heading said it all. Proper pool water care requires both free AND total chlorine testing.

Why? Quite simply, it does little good for the sanitation of a pool to have an in-range total chlorine reading with a very low, or non-existent, free chlorine reading. When that happens the pool contains mostly, if not entirely, chloramines (aka: combined/used chlorine molecules) which possess very little (limited) oxidizing power… and limited oxidizing power means limited sanitizing capabilities.

Improperly sanitized pool water can EASILY become a home in which various bacteria, parasites and viral ‘issues’ which will flourish, breed and infect swimmers if left unchecked.

Repeated Moral of the Story

Invest in a meter that test for both total chlorine concentrations AND free chlorine concentrations.

We suggest using a meter like the eXact Micro 7+ Pool & Spa Meter because it tests for not only free AND total chlorine, but also for Total Alkalinity, Bromine, Calcium Hardness, Copper, Ozone, Permanganate, and pH… all with the same meter!

Earlier we talked about the Extech’s USEPA credentials so naturally we figure you want to know if the eXact Micro 7+ Meter has credentials, too — and it does! When used with DPD chemistry (and the appropriate procedures, of course) the meter qualifies as an EPA Compliant device for testing free an total chlorine in drinking water.

“But Wait! There’s More!” Screamed the Announcer

As an added bonus, the eXact Micro 7+ Pool Meter also has the ability to test for Ammonia, Chloride/Salt, Chlorine Dioxide, Chromium Hexavalent, Cyanuric Acid, Iodine, Iron, Low Range Total Hardness, Manganese, Nitrate, Nitrite, Acid pH, Alkali pH, Potassium, Sulfate, Sulfide, and Turbidity — when operated in ‘% Transmission’ mode with the appropriate eXact Micro 7+ Reagent Strips.

Yep. The phantom reagent thief struck again. Happens every year to 10′s of thousands of people worldwide. Lucky for you we know where a place that will deliver a whole new kit right to your doorstep.

Total Chlorine & pH 2-Way Test Kit for Pools and Spas

What’s that? you say you don’t need a whole new kit? Sad to say, but in most cases a whole new kit will cost about a buck or two more than purchasing just the reagents. Don’t blame us, though. We just have the gun task of delivering the news.

Today’s question comes from a woman in Illinois named ‘Gretchen246′ who asked a very interesting question… about her lawn.

“Why is my lawn green? A healthy lawn is the sign of a healthy home and my lawn is yellow. Allthe lawns here are yellow and we all fertilize and feed and do all we’resupposed to but the lawns are still yellow. Could it be the water?”

Sad to say, but the little kid in us wants to say, ” Gretchen, your neighborhood needs a leash law to keep wandering dogs from peeing all over your lawns!” Ha ha. Yep. The kid in us has not, yet, grown up all the way… and we hope it never does!

On a more serious note, if every lawn in your neighborhood has the same issue (bad grass), then it stands to reason that all of your lawns have at least SOMEthing in common. Typically all yards in a development will share a similar soil type (i.e. composition, pH, etc.), environmental conditions (rainfall, amount of sunlight, etc.) and quality of water used to keep them hydrated.

Since we know very little about soil we will pass on the opportunity to discuss that topic and move in for the kill on a topic we DO know something about: Water. Since you say your lawns stay yellow, a sure sign of a dead or dying lawn, perhaps your lawns don’t particularly care for something in the water?

As our first guess, we cast our vote for chlorine. Most municipal water systems use a form of chlorine to keep biological contaminants from growing in the water and water lines. Once out of the water line, however, chlorine will continue to wage war on biological organism… like the grass in your lawn.

Chlorine in my water?

How do you know if your tap water contains chlorine? Perform a simple test for chlorine using a product such as the WaterWorks 2 Free & Total Chlorine Test Strip. We like this product because it provides reliable test results for both free and total chlorine concentrations in water at the same time and in just a few minutes.

There’s chlorine in my water… Now what?

Well if the chlorine poses a problem (i.e. it kills your grass!) then we heartily suggest removing it from the water you use on your lawn. The products below from Gar’n'Gro should have the ability to help with that task.

For those interesting removing chlorine from their drinking water, you may want to consider installing a simple, yet effective, faucet filter such as the Crystal Quest W2 in your kitchen.

In past postings we discussed several options for removing chlorine from shower water and received numerous ‘complaints’ from readers who stated, each in their own way, that they “simply did not have enough room in their shower to install a bulky, cumbersome shower head filter.”

Having lived in many apartments before finally each getting our own houses, all of us at Water Testing Blog fully understand not wanting to clutter small, cramped shower areas with extra plumbing fixtures.

Now, however, all you apartment dwellers have the affordable option of installing a Sprite Slimline Shower Filter which uses KDF-55 and Chlorgon Media (tested and certified against NSF/ANSI Standard 177 for the Reduction of Free Chlorine in Water) to dramatically reduce free chlorine concentrations in water.

Additionally, the Sprite Slimline Shower Filter (Manufacturer’s Part Number SL-WH) also helps to balance the pH of water it filters and aids in reducing scale buildup on shower walls.

Will I need to replace my existing shower head?

Not with the Sprite Slimline Shower Filter! This unit installs directly behind your existing shower head and adds a mere 1.5″ to the fixture.

Notice How the Unit Installs Cleanly Behind the Shower Head

No plumbing experience to install this unit!

Why should I care about chlorine?

Recent and not-so-recent studies have drawn direct correlations between exposure to chlorine in shower and eye irritation, dry/itchy skin, damaged hair, and even hardening of arteries in some cases. Not to mention that folks with respiratory problems such as asthma or allergies often report worsening of symptoms as a result of chlorine exposure in the shower.

Where can I get a simple test kit for chlorine?

We still believe that SenSafe manufactures one of the simplest and cost effective methods for accurately testing both free AND total chlorine levels in water at the same time: The WaterWorks 2 Free & Total Chlorine Test Strip.

This product outperforms ‘old school’ OTO drop test kits for total chlorine and uses patented, EPA Approved test method to detect free chlorine levels — all with a dip-n-read test procedure!

As usual the warmer weather (in most of the US) has brought out the folks who have questions about pool water and how best to take care of it. Today’s question comes from ‘ActionLassie007′ who asked,

“Do they make meters for pool testing that regular people can afford? Last yr our poolguy had a meter and I asked him how much it cost. He told me one thousand and some change. He lie to me so I would not go get one and he loses a customer?”

Wow. Interesting situation, right? Personally we’d have fired the guy for telling an outlandish lie. Yeah, sure, SOME equipment used to test pool water MAY cost upwards of a thousand dollars or more, but would the average pool maintenance person REALLY spend that kind of money? We doubt it.

We suggest, Lassie, that you take a look at the eXact Micro 7+ Pool Water Testing Meter… which costs well under a thousand dollars, by the way.

Combining the reliability and repeatability of a photometer w/ the dependability of proven chemistry methods such as DPD (for chlorine testing) and phenol red (for pH testing), the eXact Micro 7+ Pool Testing Meter puts the power of accurate water testing into the hands of the people who need it most: pool owners.

A definite advantage offered by this particular pool meter: Versatility. The pool testing meter tests for 7 critical pool water parameters directly and with the use of a conversion chart and correct reagentstrip it can test for a number of other water parameters, as well.

What comes in pool water test kit?

In the basic kit you will find everything you need to test for free chlorine, total chlorine, pH, calcium hardness, total alkalinity, dissolved copper, and cyanuric acid.

Not a fan of chloramines in your drinking water? You now have a means of removing those pesky chloramines!

Chloramines? What are chloramines? Take a look at this earlier Water Testing Blog entry on Free Chlorine, Combined Chlorine and Total Chlorine and get a quick education on the topic!

Whether created as a byproduct of disinfection via free chlorine or the intended disinfectant in a water system, most people do NOT like the taste and odor of chloramines in their water.

Thankfully Pentek has come out with a product called the Pentek ChlorPlus 10 Chloramine Removal Water Filter Cartridge that fits in standard 10″ (x 2.5″) filter housings used in filter sytems produced by companies such as Pentek (obviously!), US Filter (recently acquired by Pentek!), Cuno, Filterite, Keystone, US Water, Water Resurces, Harmsco, and many other popular brands of water filtration systems. If your system uses a standard 10″ x 2.5″ housing, the Pentek ChlorPlus 10 ought to fit just fine!

Having said that last bit, please check the dimensions of your current filter and/or housing before ordering this product!

Looking for a 10″ replacement filter with NSF Certification? The Pentek ChlorPlus 10 uses a component tested certified to NSF Standard 42.

What does the Pentek ChlorPlus 10 remove/reduce? Using 1 micron carbon block technology this product (255416-43) should seriously reduce chloramine concentrations in drinking water and in doing so remove the (offensive) taste and odor associated with chlorine while also helping to pull out unwanted sediment, if present.