Active Carbon Filtration

What are carbon filters?

Carbon filters, like all water filters, are barriers that capture substances that contaminate your drinking water. Ancient Egyptians were the first to discover carbon's detoxifying powers. Carbon is still used today to remove contaminants from water, making foods and beverages taste and smell better.

How does a carbon filter work?

Carbon filters remove contaminants through adsorption. Absorption soaks up particles like a sponge to water. Adsorption adheres particles to a surface like a piece of Velcro. Organic compounds bond or stick to the surface of a carbon filter because water and contaminants are both polar compounds that attract one another.

Carbon filters are extremely porous and have a large surface area, making them effective at reducing bad tastes, odors, and other particles in water. A carbon filter acts as a parking lot with pores for parking spaces for contaminants as water flows through. The tiny pores are measured in microns. The smaller the micron, the finer the filtration. Low flow rate and pressure give contaminants more time to park or adhere to the carbon. The more contact time water has with the surface of a carbon filter, the more efficient the filtration.

What is activated carbon and how does it filter water?

Carbon is activated by heat or steam. The activation process opens the pores of a carbon filter, increasing the surface area and giving the carbon more capacity to hold contaminants. For this reason, all the carbon filters we supply are made from activated carbon in the form of granular activated carbon (GAC), carbon block, or radial carbon filters.

What do carbon filters remove?

The main purpose of these filters is to reduce common chemicals (listed below) in your drinking water. Depending on the type, size and NSF certification of the filter, more contaminants such as lead, iron, and bacteria may also be removed.

Bad tastes and odors

Volatile organic compounds

Solvents - degreasers, cleaning agents

Gasoline compounds

Chlorine

Chloramine (Only with catalytic carbon filters)

Pesticides

Herbicides

It is important to understand these filters do not reduce all contaminants. Dissolved minerals such as calcium and magnesium will remain unchanged. However, the smaller the pore size of the filter, the more contaminants will be removed. This is due to the particles simply being too large and unable to fit through the pores.

Activated carbon and chlorine

Removing chlorine is the most common reason to use a carbon filter. Chlorine makes your food, beverages, and drinking water nasty and emits a gas that you could inhale in the shower. Chlorine does not adhere to carbon. Instead, a carbon filter removes chlorine through a chemical reaction. Activated catalytic (more reactive) carbon chemically alters the chlorine molecules, converting them into a chloride.

Many water treatment plants use this chemical to disinfect water because it's a stable compound and does not dissipate like chlorine or create by-products like trihalomethane. However, chloramine makes water taste and smell bad. Chloramines are more difficult to remove than chlorine, so catalytic carbon is used. When chloramine hits the carbon filter, the carbon breaks the ammonia from the chlorine and turns it into chloride.

Where should I install my carbon filter?

Selecting the correct filter installation placement is important to create a properly functioning filtration system. It is more common that a filter is installed in one of two places, point-of-entry (POE) or point-of-use (POU) to get the most out of your system. Point-of-entry refers to the start of your water system or where the water for your home enters, this method allows you to cast a wide net and cover the entirety of your water supply. Point-of-use is narrow and focused on one source, for example, the kitchen sink faucet. This enables the user to target a specific problem location. If you are looking to eliminate chlorine from the totality of your home’s water-using appliances (like your shower or bathtub), a whole-house carbon filtration system would better serve you.

Choosing between POE or POU depends entirely on how you plan to use your system and what other systems you have in place. If you are using a water softener, it is recommended to place your carbon filter before the water softener for better results and a longer-lasting softener resin.

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