They’re also competitively priced and easy to find; these are strong points because, like all pitcher filters, they have to be replaced regularly. The Pur Pitcher Filter can tackle a full tank of water in about seven minutes; the Lead Reduction filter is slower, averaging 13 minutes in our tests. However, the whole point of a water filter pitcher is to actually remove contaminants, and the Pur filters reduce and remove more chemicals from the water than the Brita pitchers do.
So at first glance, the Brita Standard filter is less expensive than the Pur Standard filter, but the Brita Elite filter is more expensive than the Pur Plus filter. However, once we consider the number of times you’d need to replace each filter in a year based on the stated filter lifespan. That’s to be expected, to some extent, since the more intense filtration required to get rid of the aforementioned brita filter pitcher contaminants will require more frequent substitutions to maintain the same high level of water purity. BWT has their filters certified by the Water Quality Association, but they’re only covered for cadmium, copper and mercury, not lead. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), approximately 10% of people in the U.S. use private wells to obtain their drinking water.
If you’ve had a problem with your Pur or Brita filter getting clogged and stopping working, the LifeStraw dispenser may be worth switching to. A relatively new standard, 401, covers “emerging contaminants” such as pharmaceuticals, which are increasingly found in US water, and we gave extra weight to filters with this distinction. In almost every case, personal water purifiers use activated carbon to filter impurities. Carbon is very effective at catching a wide array of particles through the process of adsorption, catching chlorine and other unwanted substances in its pores. You can expect carbon filters to remove particles measuring anywhere from 50 micrometers down to .5 micrometers (a micrometer, also known as a micron, being a mere one-millionth of a meter). You might find that measurement in the specs of a purifier or even in the product blurbs if it’s an especially low number.
In a previous round of filter testing, we ran pH readings (measurements of how acidic or basic your water is) range from 0 to 14; 7 is a neutral reading. If you’re looking for a water pitcher that makes your water more alkaline, this produced the largest swing towards basic out of the alkaline pitchers in our test group. Lastly, the hollow fiber membrane filter is tucked deep inside the filter housing, making it somewhat hard to reach. You have to push it out through the bottom of the housing to replace it, and the tight confines and the tight fit of the filter could make this tough for some people.
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So for households with more than two people, this is a better option than a pitcher. The Ultramax removed about 83.4% of the lead from the contaminated supply but the filtered water still had lead concentrations that were significantly higher than what the EPA considers a safe level. However, there is a cost difference between the more advanced pitchers, the Brita Grand and the Pur Ultimate. The Brita Grand pitcher has a retail price of anywhere from $25 to $40, and includes a Brita Standard filter.
Comparing these filter categories to bottled water brands, Evian and Arrowhead match the modest mineral levels of our tap water at 300–400 parts per million. (Perrier and Gerolsteiner are two or three times higher.) There are also bottled products that go through reverse-osmosis treatment to get near-zero levels of dissolved solids, like Dasani and Aquafina. Most bottled water sits somewhere in the middle, at between 50 and 150 ppm. In our first round of research, we read studies on the types of contaminants that need to be filtered out to produce safe and great-tasting drinking water, and how the various water filters on the market work.
That’s what makes the Brita Elite filter such a nice surprise; you get high-quality filtration and don’t have to swap the filter every couple of months. We wanted to see how much difference filter type really makes with taste’s biggest enemy, chlorine. So, we called in a Hatch chlorine test kit that can detect a .01 part-per-million (ppm) difference in total chlorine.