What water treatment system do you recommend for residential on public water?

We live in a farming community, and we have well water. If our water were untreated, it would be simply disgusting. We did a bunch of research, and asked what our neighbors were using. for starters we installed a soft water system. If there’s a lot of iron in your water like there is in ours, you have to use a special salt for the water softener. that helps, but it doesn’t get rid of the smell. Apparently iron in the water makes it stink when it gets hot. There’s a device you can put in your water heater to help with the smell.

We also have a lot of sediment and lots of farm chemicals in the water. We have six filters in the garage along with the water softener for household use.

We have five more filters underneath the kitchen sink for drinking and cooking.

I will find out the information on what we have and post it here.

I use a three stage under sink filter. It breaks out to its own faucet. You don’t even need a plumber to install it. There are a bunch of brands, this is what I have now

Okay, we put an electric anode rod in our water heater. It gets rid of the smell. More later.

In my case, the water supply is from Lake Lanier, GA (freshwater mountain-fed lake), and the county does a far amount of pre-processing before it delivers water to homes. The county has won several awards for water cleanliness and taste. So I don’t need to use further filters or cleaners at home.

My neighbor has Culligan. From what I understand, they’re 4k now.

Water softener. Buy one at Lowe’s and fly Rick and me down and he’ll install it for free.
BTW soft water sucks.

It really depends on several things. It sounds like you are on city water and they don’t do a great job of treating the water. Do you want to treat just water at something like the kitchen sink or are you looking to treat the entire home? Something for just one sink is typically relatively cheap and is something you can easily put in yourself.

If you are going to install a system for your whole house, I’d say you have to consider what you want to do. The obvious best answer is a Reverse Osmosis (RO) unit. This will take care of all your needs of removing chemicals and hardness. The drawback to the RO units is they are expensive and somewhat costly to operate. Water flows into a tube that has a membrane in it. As the water flows through it will, of course, try to flow through the membrane. But the membrane is semi-permeable allowing only Hydrogens and Oxygens to get through (water only). All chemicals including calcium, chlorine, fluoride, etc are flushed on through. The problem with RO is there is a lot of water wasted usually.

After that, you have some choices. Here’s what you will see advertised:

Physical filter: usually a cloth wound tube. Water flows around it and passes through the cloth, filtering out solids. Most systems will have something like this and it is a good idea even with city water. Dirt, grit, metal flakes, etc can all be pulled out with this. The filter cartridges are easily replaced and are relatively cheap. This will not remove any chemicals and will not impact the hardness.

Carbon filter: This is just what it says. It is a tube of granular activated charcoal. The charcoal granules are very porous increasing the amount of surface area each granule has. The water flows over and through these granules and it is here that the chemicals are pulled out. That is the purpose…removing chemicals and organics. These cartridges last a fairly long time (depending on how polluted the incoming water is) and are usually easily replaced at a fairly low cost.

Mixed Bed resin filter: Mixed Bed resin is a mixture of anion and cation resin beads. These are polycarbonate beads, very small, that have an affinity for exchanging out anions and cations in your water. It may be sold as H-OH resin…Hydrogen-Hydroxide. As water flows in, the ions in the water are interacting with the beads. The beads have exchange sites (at the molecular level) where something like a chlorine ion (Cl-) will be tied up on a bead that will give up a hydroxide (OH-) ion in its place. Something like a sodium ion (Na+) will interact with the other type of resin, getting tied up resulting in a hydrogen ion (H+) being released. If course the H+ and the OH- ions will get back together, becoming H2O. These resin columns are fairly expensive, usually somewhat difficult to replace, but usually (depending on crap in the city water) will last quite some time.

UV treatment: Ultraviolet light (UV) is often used to “polish” the water. The water, after being filtered and cleaned goes through a place where it flows around a UV light. The radiation coming from the UV light will break up any organics and kill any bacteria/viruses in the water. Many treatment options have this. The lights last a fairly long time, can usually have some sort of indication if the bulb burns out, can be replaced fairly easily as well though depending on the size of the bulb it could be somewhat costly.

So you need something to pull out solids, something to remove organics and chemicals something to clean up the water and something to sanitize it. That is what you would need if you want water that is mostly H’s and O’s and nothing else. Depending on your needs, there are other options. Water softeners are usually in a system to remove the hardness. It works much as an ion exchange as the aforementioned MB resin, though usually it is limited on what will be pulled out. It is literally a salt bed. Calcium and magnesium are the biggest hitters on hardness and these will be removed sending more sodium into your water. Cheap and easy, salt isn’t particularly expensive, but it is sometimes a pain in the ass to replace/refill the column.

My recommendation would be to talk to a professional, especially for installation of a whole house unit. Plumbers are far more familiar with code and know many hard-learned tricks to avoid problems later on.

I put in a single-stage (single-cylinder) Culligan filter on my kitchen cold water tap. It was less than $100 plus $30—$50/year for a new filter. I use that for drinking and cooking. I don’t worry about the hot water or the bathroom.

It’s very low flow. I tolerate it but would not recommend it.

If I were to replace it, I would research the $200—$400 reverse osmosis units I see on Amazon to see if the flow is at least 2x what I have.

Also, a couple of things I googled up:

The Spruce dot com – The 9 Best Reverse Osmosis Systems of 2024

The Spruce dot com – The 7 Best Whole-House Water Filters of 2024

Just to add that if anybody wants their water tested, sometimes your local Health Dept or Environmental Conservation Dept (or it might go by another name in your area) may do water testing for free. Google your town, county or state government site for info. I just googled mine and may call in the next few days to see if I can get my water tested.

If you are only worried about drinking the water, I would go with RO. It only costs ~$200 from Costco and takes everything out. But for every gallon processed, it spits out 3–4 gallons. For the system we have, I route the waste water to a 40 gal barrel outside the kitchen window. Our RO system takes out chlorine before the water gets to the membrane. Our plants love the waste water because it has more concentrated minerals than in regular tap water (since 25% of the pure water was taken out) and has no chlorine. RO is much too slow and wasteful for supplying your whole house. RO water also eats solder in copper pipe systems so don’t RO your home plumbing if you have copper pipes.