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Whenever our water quality team at Save Home Heat Company speaks with a homeowner about water treatment products that make sense to consider for her or his home, we take the time to review necessary routine maintenance for the system they’re considering, before a purchasing decision is made. Effectiveness, reliability, durability, and maintaining the valuable protections that the product provides – without taking proper care of your water filter or water treatment system, these benefits can’t be enjoyed year after year. This routine maintenance is a commitment you should plan on making when you pull the trigger on a purchase, or your investment will be for naught.

This emphasis on proper routine maintenance also holds for when we service or consult on an existing, permanent home water filter or treatment system. Just like with air filters, furnaces, heat pumps, tankless heaters, and many other products that our team at Save Home Heat installs, routine water filter or related servicing simply should not be ignored.

In this post, we’ll provide an overview of some of the more common water treatment products that we install and service, taking a closer look at their routine maintenance needs.

As many homeowners are aware, a water softener is a whole-house water treatment system that removes hardness from water entering your home from either a municipal or private well source. The potential negative impacts of hard water are several and varied, from affecting your health, to shortening the life of manual and automatic water valves, a range of appliances (including your water heater), and even the copper piping in your home. Excessively hard water can prove costly if neglected for too long.

Water softeners periodically require the addition of a special salt to the system. Our water quality team at Save Home Heat normally recommends and uses these salts in a pellet form. While there’s plenty of variables that affect how often salt should be added to a softener, every six months, or about twice a year, is fairly common. Many homeowners handle this task, themselves, but we’re glad to help out.

Good Rule of Thumb: Avoid water softener salts that advertise special additives! Talk with our team if you’re considering such a product.

RO filters contain a number of internal filters that require regular replacement. These include a sediment filter, carbon filters, an RO membrane, and possibly other stage filters such as a remineralizer. Replacing the internal filters should be done approximately once a year, although usage patterns can impact this schedule. It’s not unusual for our team to install or service RO filters that have from 3 to 5 stages.

Simply put, sediment filters remove particles that are suspended in the water, and are rated by the particle size that they are effective capturing. One of the most common types of whole-house, inline sediment filters is designed to remove particles whose size is 5 microns or larger, similar in performance to the prefilters used in products such as RO filters – but without any additional filtration stages. There’s also sediment filters available that can do much heavier lifting, including more effective performance at smaller particle sizes.

Certain whole-house, inline water filters are designed to take performance to another level, and are highly effective at removing a wide range of water pollutants, beyond basic sediment. These pollutants include lead, PFAS chemicals, certain parasites, chemicals such as chlorine and chloramine, and more.

The PIONEER Pb, from Enpress, is our go-to water filter for removal of many pollutants that pose significant health risks. If you are concerned about lead, PFAS and PFOAs, this is the product our team most often recommends. It is also effective at mitigating the negative side effects of the common municipal water sanitizers, chlorine and chloramine, as well as parasites such as Giardia.

Carbon Filters

Carbon water filters are available for either whole-home or point-of-use applications. These filters mitigate the potential undesirable effects of the sanitizers chlorine and chloramine, as well as other substances such as VOCs, organic pesticides, and potential sanitizer byproducts. They’re also effective at addressing taste and smell issues.

In homes that are served by a municipal water system, carbon water filters should be checked annually by testing the home’s water for chlorine. If chlorine levels are not at or very close to zero, it’s time to replace the filter element. Depending on the design of the carbon filter, this could be a very simple procedure, or it might require the assistance of a water quality professional like our team at Save Home Heat Company.

Ultraviolet treatment water filters, also known as UV water purifiers, are often employed where unhealthy bacteria in a water supply has been identified. These types of filters are most commonly used in rural and mountain areas where a private well is in use, however, they may also be recommended in urban areas where unusual conditions are present.

The logical first step when considering upgrades to improve your home’s water quality is to have your water tested. For homeowners in the Denver-Metro, Boulder, and Loveland-Longmont areas, our water quality team at Save Home Heat Company currently offers complimentary in-home water testing for eight common water issues, including hardness, pH, iron, fluoride, and more. When necessary, we work with outside, state-accredited labs on our customer’s behalf, and those testing costs are passed along to our customer. Our staff Master Water Specialist will gladly answer all your questions fully and patiently, in a friendly, low-pressure, transparent manner. No sales hype.