This week I’m talking about filter performance claims.
It’s a big issue that just gets below the radar of most consumers.
If you’ve never sighted our ‘whole-of-life’ laboratory test results, click here.
How we calculate a ‘whole of life’ filter test.
Firstly we make a calculation on how many litres we expect the filter to process. In our case we based it ona family of four drinking 2 litres per day every day. Multiply that out and we came up with the ‘target’ litre count.
Then we had to find a laboratory willing to run the UltraStream for the target litres. This costs a lot more because most tests are of a simple sample: a single test performed once.
In our case it was a local university. We still needed them to pass through a ‘witches’ brew of chemicals to see how the filter reacts to them. To run it continually would require 25 200 litre drums of poisons, so we do the ‘witches’ brew at the beginning of the test and at the end, but we actually run water from the laboratory supply through the UltraStream to the target litre total.
This tells us how the UltraStream filter performs if poisons/contaminants are introduced at the beginning of filtration and at the end of filtration. Ultimately it’s the only honest way to prove a filter.
