When to Change a Carbon Water Filter to Avoid Health and Plumbing Problems
Having carbon water filtration in your home is one of the simplest and most inexpensive ways to replicate the forces of nature within your home. A carbon water filter works much the same way natural water filtration does. But while nature has ways to deal with the material that filtered out, it all stays within man made filter cartridges. This can cause problems with health and with the proper operation of the filter so it's important to keep up with maintenance.
In nature there is a continual process that removes contaminants from water as is passes through soil. The bacterial contaminants either die or migrate elsewhere out of the soil. Physical particles will get trapped in the natural carbon of the soil while the now clean water makes it through and collects elsewhere.
Since this continual process cannot take place within the carbon filters of your home filtration systems you need to manually replace the cartridges. The frequency of this replacement depends in large part to the brand and the type of cartridge you are using, as well as how much water you pass through the filter. In some cases you will need to replace the filter every few weeks while with other types you can go many months.
The type of filter cartridge that requires the most frequent replacement are the small faucet mounted filters. These are very convenient water filters in that there is no pitcher to fill, but since it is physically smaller the carbon will get used up more quickly by being filled with contaminants. Certain brands of these filters will have an indicator to tell you when the filter needs to be changed, while others lack that feature. If your carbon cartridge does not have this kind of indicator then you should consider changing it at least once each month, or when the water flow decreases noticeably.
With pitcher style water filter systems you can go a bit longer between cartridge replacements. In many cases you can go about three months. This makes it somewhat simpler to remember when to replace the cartridge as you can schedule it to coincide with each quarter of the year. You can also plan to have a year's worth of filters on hand for replacement, and this would only be four filters.
There are also refrigerators with water dispensers that have built in water filtration. With this type of dispenser it's fairly typical that there will be an indicator on the refrigerator door that will indicate when the filter is in need of replacement. While it may be tempting to ignore these warnings and just hit the reset button, there are some very good reason to carry out the recommended replacement.
For the health argument, you don't know for how much longer the filter will be effective. While there is a certain level of safety built in to the time limits on the filter cartridges, you don't really know how long that is and you don't know how long it will be before the contaminants that were filtered out will get back into your water due to the carbon being saturated.
