Recently, a number of news reports and scholarly articles have been written stating that a record number of medicinal traces have been found in our water supply. This is a scary proposition, because we all drink from this water, bathe with it, and use it to wash our clothes. Of course, medicinal traces are just some of the many contaminants we can find in drinking water. Previous purification methods such as chlorination have been found to cause adverse side effects, and even water's natural minerals can cause our bodies harm over time. To protect you and your family, you'll need to install a drinking water purifier in your home to clean up all the water that you consume.

Do It Yourself or Have It Installed

Drinking water purifiers are very easy for you to install by yourself, depending on which type you purchase. A purifier like the Brita water filter is simple enough that you can do it yourself, and these can come in water pitchers that you have to pour water into every single time to fill it up (requiring a lot of filling up) or purifiers that fit over your sink faucet, providing a constant stream of purified water as needed. These drinking water filters are relatively cheap, and they provide a good, if temporary, solution. Many people will probably want to replace them with something more permanent in the years to come.

A longer lasting drinking water purifier option is one that is built right into your plumbing system. These offer a wider range of options to help clean your water, and they are, by far, more permanent solutions. However, you may still need to change the filtration cartridges once in a while to maintain their efficiency, although some models do not have even these anymore. These drinking water purifiers are also more expensive than the pitcher and faucet mounted models, but you won't have to worry about changing filters nearly as much, if at all.

Distillation drinking water purifiers work by boiling water and having the vapor rise to cool on metal racks, collecting as purified water and leaving the contaminants down below. Other popular water filtration systems include UV purifiers and reverse osmosis systems. UV purifiers shoot ultraviolet rays through water, cleansing it of all biological agents. Reverse osmosis systems, on the other hand, use water pressure to force water through a tiny screen with holes tinier than the eye can see. This catches all sorts of contaminants and has become the golden standard of purification systems on the market today. Any of these purifiers will help to clean your water up, but a reverse osmosis drinking water purifier will do the best job out of any of them.