When scale forms in the kettle, you don’t want to drink that water.
To make it cleaner, you can install a filter. The simplest and cheapest is a filter jug . On Yandex Market their prices start from 590 ₽. But there are other options, among which I chose the best.
Team criteria
Filtering abilities. Filters have one cartridge – block, module, cassette, stage – or there are several. The more there are, the more levels of purification the water goes through and the result is cleaner and safer. The cartridges contain a filler or liner that traps dirt and hazardous particles.
Filter resource. This is the maximum volume of water that the filter can pass through and clean. You can pour more, but then the water will pass as it is.
Installation location. The filter can be placed on the table, attached to the faucet, shower, installed next to the sink, under it or on the pipe. Some take up little space, like mug-sized faucet attachments. And for ten-liter filter systems you need a whole cabinet.
Price per liter of finished water. Each cartridge has an amount of resource that it can filter. I divided the cost of the cartridge by the volume of the resource. For calculations, I used cassettes for hard water from all filters.
Consumables. Any filter needs to change cassettes. There are no such things that you can put on once and for the rest of your life. Here I assessed the frequency and cost of replacing cassettes and other spare parts.
Features of the filter. Features of operation and care, what can break, what needs to be tightened, what is included.
How to choose a water filter
Understand what you expect from the filter. To remove scale from a kettle, so that the water is not yellow, so that it does not smell of bleach – these are all different tasks, and each has its own cartridge.
Find out whether your water is soft or hard. This can be found on the city water services website. For example, there is a map of Moscow at Mosvodokanal and a hardness calculator. For St. Petersburg there is a table by district from October 2022. Focus on a larger number of indicators.
Estimate your budget for purchasing a filter now and for annual maintenance. Some cassette sets are more expensive than the cleaning system, and they may need to be changed every three months.
See if it’s easy to buy consumables, install it yourself and apply for warranty. If the filter under the sink leaks, it is better to be able to call a technician. Or quickly buy additional parts and fix it by hand.
Consider whether the environment and water bills are important to you. The reverse osmosis filter crystal purifies a lot of water, and it has inexpensive consumables. But for every five clean liters, it drains 10-15 liters of waste water into the sewer.
Garlands with full support for a smart home began to appear relatively recently. They install a module with Wi-Fi, with the help of which the garland communicates with the server and from there receives commands from the application or smart speaker.
A “full-fledged” smart garland is convenient because it does not require purchasing an additional smart socket; all timers, scenarios and controls are available immediately on your smartphone.
But so far, such garlands are not very functional: you can only turn them on and off with your voice, and you still need a separate application to set modes and colors. In addition, they may not be as well protected as big-brand light bulbs or sockets, and they can be used by attackers to intrude on your home Wi-Fi network and the computers connected to it.
Most smart garlands available in Russia are compatible with several smart home systems: Alice from Yandex, Marusya from VK and Apple HomeKit, but it is better to carefully check compatibility before purchasing.
An alternative is the single-stage Aquabright ABF-10-34. This is the same transparent flask as the previous “Aquabright ABF-3 ½”. But you can install only one cassette there, if three is too much. Typically filters work with cold water up to 35°C, but this one has a cassette for hot water up to 82°C.
Usually users install polypropylene or rope cartridge. “VP-5 M Slim Line 10″” costs 103 ₽ per piece. Polypropylene cartridge “PP-10 M Slim Line 10″” – 73 ₽ per piece. A liter of purified technical water—0.01 RUR.