Everyone is becoming far more health conscious these days, and this doesn’t just involve exercising more and eating better. It also comes down to the quality of water consumed as well.

That is why many homeowners choose to have a mains water filter, so they can be confident the water they consume is pure and uncontaminated.

There are several ways to filter drinking water at home, with one of the best being a system that involves reverse osmosis.

To find out more, read on.

What is reverse osmosis?

To understand reverse osmosis, it is important to get to grips with what osmosis is. This is the process whereby a weaker saline solution gravitates towards a mixture with a higher saline content.

In layman's terms, if you have a vessel with both salt and fresh water and the two separated by a semipermeable membrane, the water with a lower concentration of salt will travel through to the saltier solution.

Therefore, reverse osmosis is the opposite, working by putting pressure on liquid till it passes through a semipermeable membrane to the water with a lower salt concentration. This goes against its natural migratory trend, which is why energy needs to be applied to move the water with a higher salt content to the other part of the vessel.

The semipermeable membrane works by allowing the water molecules to pass through, but trapping the contaminants so they are filtered out of the solution. This means impure water can be made clean and healthy, as the bacteria, minerals and salts have been blocked by the membrane.

Anything that is not able to pass through to the drinkable water can either be immediately rejected or filtered through the system again. This provides another chance to catch any pure water that may have been left in the solution the first time round.

What does reserve osmosis block?

To give you an idea of why a reverse osmosis water filtration system is beneficial to your health, it is good to know how many different things it is capable of blocking.

For instance, it can stop fluoride, salt, arsenic, chlorine, herbicides, pesticides, sediment, and volatile organic compounds.

Therefore, it significantly reduces the amount of contaminants in drinking water, as well as sodium levels. It also gets rid of any bad tastes or smells from the beverage, and is more environmentally friendly than continuously buying bottled water.

Why is filtered water better for you?

Although removing impurities sounds good, many people are not fully aware of the health benefits of drinking uncontaminated water.

For a start, chlorine is regularly found in tap water as it is used to clean it. However, drinking it in large quantities can have negative implications on physical wellbeing. It can result in stomach aches, diarrhoea and vomiting, as well as cause dry, itchy skin, low blood pressure, blurry vision, throat pain, blood in stools, burning in the mouth and throat swelling.

Filtered water also has minerals and metals removed, which are often found in tap water as a result of the old pipes it runs through. Therefore, you can guarantee your drinking water will not have a metallic taste.

You can also be sure you will drink less limescale, which have been known to lead to stomach aches and excess wind. Limescale can also build up in baby bottles, making it harder for children to drink from them safely.