I found this on Amazon: $13 Dupont whole house filtration system: http://amzn.to/1gl6VQM
What kind of cartridges would I need to get the nasties out of my beer water?
Any carbon filter needs adequate contact time to neutralize chlorine. Running the water too fast through it will only result in *some* chlorine removal. It will do little in the way of chloramine removal. Also, you need to test the output water for chlorine periodically to ensure the carbon isn't saturated with contaminants, preventing it from doing it's job.
It depends a lot on your local water and what you're trying to filter out. The best answer to this question is to get a local water quality report and then see how they treat it. Then you can decide what you need to filter out.
For example, they might use chlorine in which case you'd need a filter capable of filtering or chlorine. Or they might use chloramines (which my municipality does) and you need a filter capable of breaking the chloramine bond and filtering it out.
You'll also see some setups have multiple stages - first stage you might have to filter out sediments before entering a second stage filter. Again, it all depends on your water quality. I ended up having to go with a 2-stage 20" with a first stage sediment filter to protect a very expensive second-stage chloramine filter. And it was the difference between good beer, and outstanding beer when I did. Seriously, you can see and taste the difference of the water out of the filter.
Hope this helps. I found the guys here to be extraordinarily helpful: http://www.purewaterproducts.com/.
Excellent. I am looking at my municipal water report right now, and there is no indication of chloramine. I am quite overwhelmed by the abundance of cartridges, but if I can find a cheap one such as this http://amzn.to/1G4U7CM that claims to get the chlorine down, I should be ok, I guess.
Is it normal for the swivel hose adapter to be leaky? Or did I just get a bad one?
Some filters are built of soft plastic, which is a design flaw as the threads will still permit the smallest bit of water to get through. I bought the blue Dupont ones, and no matter how much teflon tape I use, I always get dripping.
"whole house" typically means just that - a filter installed near where water enters the house, and all water entering the house goes through it.
BUT... be careful here - you can push water through a 10" x 2.5" sediment filter much faster than you can get adequate treatment running water through a 10" x 2.5" carbon block.
We would never recommend a 10" x 2.5" carbon block for instance to treat chlorinated water over about 0.5 gpm. Flow out of a garden hose may be 10 x that flow.
Flow in a 3/4" copper pipe would be around 11 gpm - way, way, way too fast for a 10"x 2.5" carbon block.
There are four commonly available/standard-sized carbon blocks - and the bigger the filter, the faster the flow they can handle. Best to keep flows at about half the max for chlorine removal.
10" x 2.5" Max flow is 1 GPM,
20" x 2.5", 2 GPM
10" x 4.5", 3 GPM
20" x 4.5", 6 GPM
Flows faster than that require multiple carbon blocks. But in practice, it's often more economical to go with a backwashing carbon tank at that point.
Also - it's good practice to install a sediment filter ahead of any carbon block. This will keep the sediment out of the block so the block can do what you want it to do.
Russ
It is quite possible for me to run the water through the filter faster than the ideal rate but even at full flow the water from the filtered faucet has less chlorine flavor than that from the unfiltered faucet. I usually cut the flow down when filling the brew kettle but still use a campden tablet for good measure.
It is good that you also add the campden tab to the water. You really do have to reduce the flow rate through a carbon filter unit in order to provide complete chlorine compound removal from water. Pushing water through at too high a rate does mean that some of those chlorine compounds make it through into the brewing water. It takes incredibly little of those compounds in your wort to screw up your beer. The campden dose should solve that problem.
The chlorine is added as a disinfectant, and its best to let it serve that purpose.
Thought I might offer an update on the original post: You can still get all of the parts listed/shown at Lowes but whirlpool has gone to 3/8" fittings on the filter housing instead of what I think was 3/4" when johnsma22 put it together in 2007. The blue plastic line that comes with the filter (intended to hook up to your faucet) works great in place of the PVC and allows you to not build a mounting bracket. The whole setup cost about $60 last week.
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