[For convenience, I have included links to companies and products. I don’t get anything for these links.]

The quality of the water you drink has a very big effect on your overall health. There is also a great deal of bad information on water out there. I want to relate my experiences with water and how I finally got decent drinking water. In the process, I experienced BAD tap water’s effects, “pure” water’s effects and the health consequences associated with them.

Back in the 1990s, after my father died, I decided I needed to focus on being healthier. I started going to the gym and also drinking more water. I had a carbon filter on my drinking water and I thought I was good to go. But, I wasn’t.

Drinking Enough Water is Important, But……

At the time, I was reading about the importance of hydration and that most people needed to drink from 1/2 gallon to 1 gallon of water per day so I decided that’s what I needed to do as well.

The first thing I discovered was that it is impossible to keep track of how much water you drink just using your memory. So I devised a system. I got a gallon container, stored it in the fridge (because I prefer cold water) and only drank my water from the gallon container. At the end of the day, I could easily tell how much water I had consumed and it was easy in the course of an entire day to drink 1/2-1 gallon of water.

So, I was getting plenty of hydration. What I didn’t realize until later when the symptoms kicked in, I was getting other things out of the water as well that were NOT good for me..

This didn’t happen overnight. But after several years I noticed that my skin was dry, my nails brittle, my hair texture not good and other symptoms, including a below normal body temperature. Yes, I was having hypothyroid symptoms. I got a book written by Dr. Broda Barnes called

Hypothyroidism: The Unsuspected Illness

It confirmed all the symptoms I’d been having and told what sorts of things caused it. The main cause was lack of Iodine. This was made worse by the halogens of iodine: Bromine, Chlorine and Fluoride. A halogen has similar chemical properties but is not the same. Let’s say that Iodine is gasoline for your thyroid engine, Bromine, Chlorine and Fluoride are diesel fuel. Technically, diesel IS a fuel but NOT for your gasoline engine. You put it in your car, your gasoline motor is damaged and stops working. That’s what happens to your thyroid with fluoride, bromine and chlorine.

I knew that I was filtering out the chlorine and I was not consuming products with bromine, so why did I have this problem? Upon further investigation, I found out that, after over a century of providing public water, the current people in charge of the water system decided to put fluoride in the water supply right at the time I started drinking more water. They did this despite heated public meetings of citizens opposed to it (State law requires public meetings on major decisions but the people behind the decisions NEVER listen to the public and view the meetings as an inconvenience to themselves; they do what they want, not the citizens). To my knowledge, there was No notice sent out on the monthly water bills alerting consumers to the fluoride plan or I’m sure a great many more people would have shown up to protest.

Thus, to be healthy, I had increased my hydration levels and so, every day, I was getting a mega dose of Fluoride without knowing it. The LIE about fluoride in the water is that it helps protect teeth from cavities. Did it help my teeth? That would be a BIG no. In fact, the health of my mouth got worse despite brushing and mouthwash. Then of course, my thyroid was damaged and my health deteriorated literally every day.

Having a whole house size charcoal filter on my drinking water taking out the chlorine. I thought I was safe but that type of filter is not capable of taking out fluoride. So, for a number of years without knowing, I was consuming water heavily contaminated, yes CONTAMINATED, with a toxic waste product that is so hazardous, the people who dump it into the drinking water supply have to wear protective suits and masks, e.g. hazmat gear, to avoid being killed by it. Yet, we are suppose to drink this stuff?

So, my “healthy” consumption of charcoal filtered water at hydration levels had wrecked my health in my early 40s. I had first hand experienced that consuming fluoride in the water was a hazard. I didn’t know it was there, I started having symptoms of my thyroid not working properly and my dental health deteriorated despite brushing, etc. This was my own personal blind experiment to the dangers of fluoride in drinking water because I did not know about the fluoride in the local water supply.

Fluoride is Bad News…. And Hard to Get Rid Of….

So I had to find a solution to get rid of fluoride because it is simply NOT cost effective to drink bottled water in the hydration levels needed and you cannot really trust most of the companies that bottle them anyway (some companies just fill up the bottles from their local tap).

So now I had a thyroid problem, which I didn’t have before, that I had to correct. I will tell you how I got my thyroid repaired in a future post.

To stop the on-going damage to my thyroid and my health, I had to get the fluoride out of my drinking water.

When researching removing the fluoride out of the water, it was obvious a charcoal filter did not do the job. Actually, the only two ways to remove Fluoride is with either distillation or reverse osmosis. I also discovered there was a great many other things in tap water that were not good for you, so I knew I had to clean up the water.

Distillation is time consuming, expensive and makes only small quantities at a time so I opted for reverse osmosis. I needed something that operated itself so all I had to do when I needed water was turn on a faucet.

Now, the people advocating both distillation and reverse osmosis talked about the need to drink “pure” water. In other words, to drink the product of either distillation or reverse osmosis rather than doing anything to it. I discovered this was seriously BAD advice. Some of these people were suppose to be trained health care professionals!

I made the mistake of following this advice and let me tell you, it almost killed us and it did kill a beloved pet before I realized what was happening.

Drinking “Pure” Water is Not a Good Idea

Let me tell you WHY you should never drink distilled water or untreated reverse osmosis water: ACID. So-called “pure” water is a solvent that pulls minerals out of the cells; alkaline minerals that you need (ever heard of electrolytes?). The body has to exist in a state called homeostasis or balance. You input a lot of acid, e.g. distilled or reverse osmosis water, the body has to buffer it with your electrolytes of calcium, magnesium, potassium and sodium to achieve balance. If you are not supplementing HEAVILY with these minerals, you run out and then what happens? You can die like my beloved pet (to this day, I feel awful that this happened when I was trying to do something good for everybody).

After I got the reverse osmosis system going, I was glad I was finally getting rid of the fluoride and other unsafe contaminants in our drinking water. However, I began to notice that the more of this “healthy” pure water I drank over time, the worse I felt; every day I felt worse. I started having high blood pressure to the point that the pounding gave me a headache. If I would drink something acidic like green tea, within minutes, the pounding would start and I would also have episodes of irregular heart beats which is a very disturbing feeling. I was confused because I thought I was doing something beneficial to my health by drinking “pure” water. After all, health care professionals said so.

Do NOT Drink “Pure” Water!

It took a number of months to figure it out but the light bulb eventually went off before it killed the entire family but I did lose a pet; this water was making us all sick and would have eventually killed us. It was just slower with us because people are bigger than a pet.

Drinking so-called “pure” water is a real hazard and yet I have seen supposed health experts advocating it. I guess they are counting on the fact that most people do NOT drink enough water every day because I can tell you from personal experience, if you drink the volume of water recommended for normal hydration, “pure” water will KILL you like it did the young woman in CA who was participating in a radio contest that required drinking a lot of water (The station supplied “pure” bottled water cleaned by reverse osmosis). The young woman died from losing too many electrolytes.

At this point, I was concerned because it was obvious that the “pure” reverse osmosis water had damaged our health. I did a lot of research and it seemed that properly re-mineralized water will not harm you, whereas “pure” water with no minerals will. As a matter of fact, when I was a child, they use to sell distilled water in the drug stores for steam irons and vaporizers. The bottles were clearly marked, DO NOT DRINK! Today, there is no such label on distilled water but there should be!

So, I got a pH test kit to see what the “pure” water being produced by the reverse osmosis system was reading and it was a pH 3, very STRONG acid and very unsafe to drink.

How to Make Reverse Osmosis Water Safe to Drink

Thus, I was back to square one. How to get an affordable but fluoride free water supply that was safe to drink.

I started doing research on pH and water. I found a book by Sang Whang called Reverse Aging (Still available and a good book). I learned that in Japan and Korea, strong alkaline water (electrolyte rich) is considered a medical treatment for high blood pressure and that they sell alkaline water machines, considered medical devices, to concentrate the minerals in their drinking water. Of course, they also don’t put fluoride in their water so they can use an alkaline water machine to concentrate their tap water minerals but such a device would not help my situation due to the utility putting toxic fluoride in the water supply. However, Sang Whang had manufactured a strong alkaline solution called ALKALIFE that treats reverse osmosis water to make it pH safe.

I did not know if it would work or not but I had to do something fast. “Pure” water was literally killing us.

I bought a supply of Alkalife. The product is still available and I continue to use it after 15 years. However, it is not cheap but it is highly effective; it works!

I experimented with my gallon of “pure” reverse osmosis water that started out at a hazardous pH of 3.0. I would put in 10 drops of Alkalife and take a test sample to measure the pH. Using this process, I discovered that to bring up the pH to therapeutic alkaline levels, which is a pH of 10.0,  an entire gallon of “pure” reverse osmosis water required 60 drops of alkalife. That makes a bottle last less than a week at hydration levels of consumption.

Since it worked, this is what I did for emergency purposes but it was not a really cost effective solution because a bottle only lasted about a week which amounted to over 100$ per month of alkalife.

After the awful experience of the “pure” water, I was concerned if the Alkalife would do the job and make the reverse osmosis water safe. But drinking the alkalife treated reverse osmosis water solved the blood pressure problem and irregular heart issues. In other words, it made the reverse osmosis water safe to drink.

How to Make Reverse Osmosis Water Safe Economically

Although the Alkalife was very effective, it simply took too much of it per gallon of reverse osmosis water. Over 100.00 per month was simply too much to maintain so I had to find a less expensive way to make the “pure” water safe.

In my search, I discovered that the acidic nature of reverse osmosis water was common knowledge and that there were mineral filters you could add to the water coming out of the tank to automatically put the minerals back in. Usually, these re-mineralizer filters just had calcium in them and too much calcium is not good. However, I found a company that had a filter that was a 50/50 mix of calcium AND magnesium!

As a bonus, the filter housing was gigantic and the media lasted literally for years using it on a reverse osmosis system since it was actually a whole house filter designed to process thousands of gallons per year.

So, when I put this CAL/MAG mineral filter in the reverse osmosis tank output water, the pH coming out of the RO faucet was now automatically 8.0, very safe to drink but not up to the therapeutic level recommended by Sang Whang. So, I discovered if I put 10 drops of Alkalife in the gallon, it brought it up to therapeutic levels. That made the Alkalife cost effective AND the reverse osmosis water therapeutic. Putting in the calcium and magnesium along with the potassium and sodium of Alkalife  put the major electrolytes back in the water.

To be honest, when I first started with the experiment, I didn’t know if it was going to work but it did. As a family, we have now been using this water for 15 years. Everyone that has tried this mineralized water loves it.

We use a great deal of this water. We drink it and cook with it. The cooking water is right out of the RO tap at 8.0 pH and the drinking water is treated with Alkalife for a pH of 10.0+.

Setting Up Your Own Water Treatment System

I use a 5 stage REVERSE OSMOSIS unit as a starting point. You can find other companies making them now on Amazon but I originally got Watts Premier because 15 years ago, they were the most common.

Now, these units come with a 3 gallon tank which is totally inadequate for using at the levels we do here. A storage tank IS required due to the time it takes for the system to clean the water. 3 gallons was inadequate so I got a larger TANK. If you have more than one member of the family, you need a larger tank.

This larger size still fit under the sink in the kitchen and easily provided the 6-7 gallons of purified water per day that we as a family use.

Now, one drawback to a reverse osmosis system is that it is low pressure. That means the water comes out of the RO faucet slowly and you cannot get out the full capacity of the tank using this low pressure by itself. So, I discovered that you can add a BOOSTER PUMP. I got the model that ran off AC so I could plug into the outlet for the garbage disposal which was also switched and makes it convenient to turn the power off to the pump when you are changing the RO filters.

With this booster pump, I could utilize the full tank capacity and also, I could hook it up to the fridge ice maker to make clean, pH safe mineral ice cubes.

Tuning the Reverse Osmosis System

The basic system I started with 15 years ago has been tuned up over the years. The original unit came with a 24 gal per day membrane which I have replaced with a 75 gal per day membrane. The 75 gal per day membrane makes a gallon of purified water every 20 mins rather than every hour which is the output of the 24 gal per day membrane. It is also the fastest membrane you can get that still takes out the most impurities in the water. You can get higher production membranes but the water quality goes down.

Membranes have to be replaced every couple of years. Make sure you get a quality membrane. I use the Dow Filmtec. The cheaper ones do NOT remove the contaminants so beware of the cheap membranes on Ebay. Remember, depending on the quality of your local water, these membranes last at least two years. That’s when I have to replace mine with the quality of the local water supply.

Also, something that I found really convenient to make certain the system was working properly was a inline TDS meter. This meter makes certain that your system is working properly, e.g. taking out the contaminants and also, you can see when you need to replace the membrane or if you accidentally got a defective membrane.

Although not needed for general use, I tuned the system up with a brine pump and different shutoff valve. You probably won’t need that if you just pull a few gallons per day. But they certainly speed up the tank refilling.

Companies I Have Used for Reverse Osmosis Supplies

Over the years, I have done business with the following companies who have provided good service and quality products:

Water Filters Online

Premium Water Filters

Water Filters online has a good department for technical support if you need it. In 15 years, I have needed it a few times.

Running Your Personal Water Treatment System

Once you make the initial investment for a reverse osmosis system, you have to change the filters twice a year and put in a new membrane every 2-3 years. My original booster pump lasted for over 10 years before the housing started leaking. Rather than replacing the pump which was fine, I was able to buy a replacement housing for 30$ from Water Filters Online.

Do you need to clean your drinking water? Yes!

This is a picture of a new reverse osmosis filter and the same filter at the 6 month change:

The water that comes out of the faucet “looks” clean but this is what is really coming out. Remember, even if your water system does not put toxic fluoride in the water, they cannot really give you quality water going through 100s of 1000s of miles of pipe. It’s impossible for them to control the water once it leaves the storage tower tank.

All they can claim is that you won’t catch a disease from the water due to the heavy chlorine they put in it (you can always tell when there has been a line break because the odor of chlorine is very high. I can also tell by the input water TDS meter reading. Around here, these lines break at least once per week).

For your good health, you can economically be your own mini-water treatment utility. If you drink the recommended amount of water per day, 1/2 to 1 gallon, you really need to put in one of these systems to clean the water and then put the good minerals back in. Then you will have safe and healthy water!