How many of you guys filter your water at home?
If you live in the US, I expect that some of you probably have a Brita or Pur countertop filter sitting around somewhere. If you live in a less well-developed part of the world, then perhaps you have a slightly more robust setup.
The water in Beijing is notorious for being bad. I don't know where I got that idea from, but it seems to be part of my basic understanding that Beijing water is semi-toxic and I need to filter it (and preferably boil it) if I wanted to drink it.
Given that assumption, I set out to try to figure out what water filter setup I should buy.
Reverse osmosis, carbon filters, oh my!
When I first started down the purchase path of finding a water filter to use in Beijing, I explored all the options on the market -- I looked at pitcher filters like Brita, reverse osmosis setups with "4 filter layers and ultrafine purification" that had to be installed under the sink, and everything in between (like 3M canister filters...etc).
After doing a couple evenings of research and finding the price range on Taobao to vary from super cheap (say, $50 USD) all the way to obscenely expensive ($300 USD), I was thoroughly confused. The problem was this: with air filtration, I have a few different reasonably-priced ways to evaluate whether my filter setup is effectively cleaning my air; with water filtration -- I don't know how I would do that.
So what did I do?
I did what any risk-averse, marketing-exposed consumer would do: I bought a brand. Now, you might be thinking that meant something like a well-known US/European brand like 3M or Doulton, but the thing that really turned me off from buying those was that both of those brands are so large as to be at risk of having counterfeit items circulating on a marketplace like Taobao.
Sometimes I'm looking for a knockoff or imitation product: say, for something like a Kindle-case, where "authenticity" isn't all that important. But in the case of something that I'm putting drinking water through, I figured it'd be better to err on the safe side.
Okay - so ... let's pick a brand... that isn't that well known
But has a big enough global brand presence that they wouldn't put their parent brand at risk by producing a sub-par product. It just so happened that one brand fit that description: Unilever. Strangely enough, Unilever doesn't produce a water filter product for any other market, but they have a line of Pureit filters (ranging from installed under-counter, wall-hanging, free-standing...etc) that seemed to fit both my budget and my use case.
So that's why I have a Unilever Pureit water filter.
And yet, I still put it through a Brita and boil it before drinking.
