I want to get some water filtration at home to get rid of fluoride, chlorine and any other nasties. I searched but there are heaps and heaps of sites and I don't know where to start. Any particular brand that is the best? Do I just ring up plumbers and ask for quotes? Recommendations?

You wont get rid of sodium flurosilicate with anything other than reverse osmosis...and that is VERY expensive and also takes out all the good stuff as well. You can get a whole-house filter to remove chlorine or you can get individual shower/tap filters. I spent weeks researching this a little while ago and we ended up with a Durand water filter which we use for drinking water, which comes out of the rainwater tank ( http://durand.com.au/ ) and we just put up with the chlorine in everything else. The local council are hooking up our neighbourhood to a different water supply soon and that has sodium fluorosilcate added to it ( from the Shanghai Mintchem development corporation (I'm sure it's perfectly safe as everything else coming out of China:) ). So I guess I'm gonna have to get off my arse and try to get them to turn off the fluoride tap, lots other countries are doing now. Watch out though cos there are psychopaths out there who want to start adding lithium to the water supply as well. :)

I can't remember the brand but when i was in China i saw the most fucking awesome filtration system ever.

From memory there was about 7 or 8 difference filters the water went through, pretty much it filtered everything down to pretty much dialysis level then added minerals back in.

If i find out what it was called ill add it up.

Edit: Here's one but not quite as awesome:

http://filters.en.hisupplier.com/product-4...ter-filter.html

Just buy bottled water it will probably be cheaper. Filtration is not for the average brain to understand.

yes fajw, you heard codecreeper. take your 'average brain' to a 7/11 or something and forget this foolhardy pursuit.

mods please close.

A lot of bottled water mobs are starting to add sodium fluorosilicate and other stuff so that's only a temporary solution.

I have one of the durand filters. I'll take a pic and show you how grubby it gets before I clean it this weekend.

And the gf threw in a stump of charcoal in the bottom section for good measure. :/

I would recommend one, not just for filtering fluoride but mainly the shit flaking off the pipes in your house (depending on how bad it is).

The Durand wont filter fluoride, and the ceramic filter has carbon on the inside so adding more isn't required. :)

http://durand.com.au/fluoridefilters.html is what I have.

That doesn't reduce fluoride?

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tinfoil+hat

So which definition is your favourite, I like 2 personally though I feel some people around here are going to be partial to 1 and 3.

Reverse Osmosis (RO) purified water is the best method of purifying for drinking. Most systems you can buy will have a fibre or mesh pre-filter for large particles, then the RO membrane, with a carbon post-filter to remove chlorine and bacteria.

A simple system like that with hoses, attachments and frame which can easily be attached to washing machine taps will cost about $350-400. Pre-filter lasts about 8months, depending on how bad your tap water is, the membrane lasts about 3-4 years, and the carbon post-filter lasts about 1 year. We get ours serviced once every year and a half, for $120, and they replace pre and post filters, back flush the membrane, and replace hoses to maintain highest quality of filtering. The need for replacing filters or servicing depends on how bad your tap water quality is...the worse the water, the more strain on the system. Usually you get your tap water analysed, they check the levels of undissolved solids, bacteria, virus, and chemicals present in the water. This will determine how long the pre- and post filters will last. A sandy water may be relatively clear of chemicals and bacteria so you will go through pre-filters quicker and post-filters slower...a clear tap water may be low in particulate matter but high in bacteria so the post-filter would wear out quicker than the pre-filter.

Our family is fastidious about pure drinking water. After 20 years of RO water, we can not drink tap water or bottled water, the taste is so bad. Bottled spring waters are a crock of shit. There is no benefit to drinking bottled spring water over tap water, as they all have to adhere to a standard, and companes will meet the minimum requirements and not more. The best commercial water available we have found is Noble's Pureau, which is also RO water.

Everyone who drinks RO water for the first time barely notices much difference in taste (or lack therof) and thus complains how disppointing RO water is, but after drinking for several days, when reverting to tap water the bad taste is quite obvious. For healtlh reasons, I drink 2L of water within the first 10mins of waking up each morning, and when you drink this much of tap water or bottled water, your throat burns with a metallic taste. Not so with RO water, or Noble's Pureau. The best natural water I have found is from a spring on Mt Wellington in Tasmania...it is cleaner than any bottled spring water I have tried.

I have more detailed snippets of interesting info regarding RO if you are interested in hearing more, or need to be convinced.

By the way, I don't believe there is any "good stuff" in water besides hydrogen and oxygen.

And oocytes.

Why have chlorine when you can have delicious oocytes?

We have a water chiller and bottled water from a local company. Their water comes from a spring in the hills, the difference in taste to tap water is remarkable.

There are a lot of scams though, "bottled water" taken from the tap, a company I know in SA who went to a lot of trouble getting their spring water tested only to find it was the same after it was filtered whilst one of their competitors who had no such qualms when tested turned out to contain pig urine - there was a piggery above their source.

Some of the alternative magazines such as Nexus seem to have a lot of ads for Grandier but the prices are a bit startling.

Australian water from the tap really is pretty awful, I noticed it when I first moved here from England, high chlorine content and I assume fluorine also. In my view chlorine is for the pool, iodine for wound treatment and I am very unconvinced of the value of fluorine in water, buy a fluoridated toothpaste if you like but drinking halogens offends me.

I suppose they'll start selling us on bromine next.

All the halogens are reactive, declining as you go up the periodic table, I'm not at all sure I want any of them in my body on a regular basis.

Fluoride really is a con, a means to sell what is essentially an industrial waste product - sure, might whiten/strengthen your teeth, but at what cost to your body in general? The damned stuff is so reactive whole factories have had their roofs blown off by the stuff.

Chlorine as a disinfectant I can live with for cooking water, it will boil off anyway, fluorine, although lighter bonds readily to create heavier molecules that are not so easily removed, or so my chemistry teacher taught us.

There is a contrary argument however - unless you are living in a bubble what you breathe is probably worse for you, "pollution" is everywhere but the human immune system is pretty good at dealing with most of it. It is somewhat indisputable that we are living longer, whilst on the flip-side cancer in kids has escalated - never saw it when I was young, I suspect susceptibility to that sea of radiation we live in is on the rise, we hardly helped with atmospheric nuclear tests when I was growing up and solar flare activity is at a high-point just now.

We can hardly control solar activity, some things you just have to live with, and possibly eventually die from, although personally I have little interest in dying :)

Still, every little bit helps, clean water is not a bad start.

Cheers

easily solved, just drink beer.
;)

Worked out well before the 19th century.

Should just drink at work and say it's for "health" reasons :)

Oh, sweet, they didn't have those when we got ours a few years back so I stand corrected. :)

Nice to know they're around for future reference.

Another thread Here that has some useful info in it.

Skeptoid's episode on Fluoridation

Short of taste or biological contaminate reasons, the water from the tap is fine. Only have to think back to the Cryptosporidium and Giardia issues in Sydney's water to realise that.

Concern about it having 'unknown' effects on our bodies is simply trying to generate fear when the body of evidence doesn't give us any any reason to believe that. Calling it a waste product is just trying to generate more fear when it is simply a by product of a process. Steam is a waste product of power generation; it is not dangerous because it is a waste product but because of the heat content.

Well, not quire Arcane, naturally occurring fluorine is a non-issue it's the compounds that are as you put it by products rather than waste that have some medical professionals concerned because there is no clear understanding of how the body deals with them, it is not fluorine, it is a fluorine compound.

Fluorine is the most reactive of the halogens but just how it behaves when in a compound is what has not had much research.

Personally I use fluoride toothpaste, would not do otherwise and at 60 have very few if any cavities, but I don't swallow toothpaste.

Chlorine in water, apart from smelling like bleach, is not something I have any real complaint over, it is necessary in a hot climate which Australia in the main is to kill bacteria and does a pretty good job. But I don't worry much about it in cooking because the chlorine boils off and the heat kills bacteria anyway. I just don't like the taste of it much in drinking water.

Cheers

Here we go, there's always one.



What 'body of evidence'? The countries that use the stuff don't do the relevant research (I guess so they can have plausible deniability) so it's left to other countries like China and India to do the work. So far there have been around 24 scientifically published articles on how it lowers intelligence alone, other studies have shown how it causes dental fluorosis and osteoporosis. Others have linked it to cancer and parkinsons and a one recent one even demonstrated it's links to atherosclerosis. Ans we are subject to all of these risks based on the presumption that 'it might stop some tooth decay'. Even if it did so that (the studies are ambiguous), it would still not be worth the price.




No it IS a waste byproduct of the phosphate fertiliser industry. It can also be waste from the aluminium industry but these days it's mostly the phosphate industry. The particular waste that goes into Queenslands water is from China, it is unprocessed and untreated, it is not 'lab grade' (whatever that means). It is not permitted to release this stuff into the air or water (that's how bad it is) so they just put it in your drinking water instead. Trust me, I've done the research, I've gotten this information straight from the local council including the MSDS.



And from your link:

That's true. It's also NOT what's being added to water supply, he's talking about calcium fluoride which a completely different thing. What's being put into your water is sodium fluoride also called sodium fluorosilicate or hexafluorosilicic acid. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_fluoride )

It's too bad they're using the same shit in toothpaste.

Even if you're not swallowing, your body is still absorbing it through your gums.


I use some organic shit that's mint flavoured - No Fluoride.

Yup, we use 'Red Seal' which has no fluoride or SLS. :)

I agree Fluoridation of our water is a waste and probably doing more harm than good. It's just been the done thing for so long that it's blindly assumed to be the opposite.

Problem is, we're inadvertently ingesting the stuff regardless of filtering or using alternate toothpaste due to it being present in the food chain and used during processing of food.

Reactivity of compounds - well, that would be something highly variable. Sodium and Chlorine are 2 things you want nowhere near you in pure form, but put together as salt are for the most part harmless in the right doses and vital for body function.

Sodium + Chlorine = sodium chloride. Again this is NOT what's being added to the water. :)

It's in there anyway to an extent.

In reality you're probably more likely to get sick from paranoia than drinking most of our "town" water.

We coped with dirty, pathogen ridden water just fine 10,000 years ago. It's just that we've evolved to the point where our immune systems for the most part never get to deal with 90% of what they used to.

I'd love to see those studies. 2 of them I could find use fluoride levels of >2mg/L which is over double the concentration of the fluoride in Australian tapwater. Also they appear to be pretty sloppy about ruling out other factors that might account for the difference in IQ. The National Research Council's response to those studies is;



Even I, a lowly undergrad, after reading through one of the studies started laughing at some of the lack of controls.

Dental fluorosis is a known issues with excessive concentrations of fluoride in water. This is the reason that Fluoridation also means the lowering of local waters fluoride levels. Dental Fluorosis is a cosmetic issue, and with the concentrations put in local drinking water unlikely to cause any major issues. It would require something such as a high fluoride source in addition or water that has higher natural concentrations.

(Hunting down these studies is making this reply take ages)


The osteoporosis claim, I have yet to track down. The only information I am finding is the possible use of fluoride to treat osteoporosis with main issues against it being that fluoride additions can't be patented and thus with no pay off there is little research going into them as a possible treatment. I thought something like this would be right up your alley as this is a clear example of big pharma not doing research on a possible natural cure.

Cancer and fluroide studies "fail[ed] to establish an association between fluoride and cancer." as per the US Public Health Service's report. NRC also came up with a similar view of the research material available. Epidemiological studies do not support the hypothesis that fluoride causes cancer as well. So without either strong lab research or even a retrospective study showing an increase in cancer since the introduction of fluroidation, I can't see where this claim is coming from.

The effects of fluoridation on tooth decay are very well documented.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19772843?dopt=Abstract
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11521913?dopt=Abstract
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11021861?dopt=Abstract
or you could just go to http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=wa...dation%20caries and have a look.

If you have a look at just fluoridation on Pubmed, there are case studies for the economic benefits of fluoridation. Your claim that it would not be worth the price seems to be at odds with that :P



It is used in the Aluminium industry, not produced by it. The majority of the hexafluorosilicic acid is used for the production of aluminium metal.



From wiki as well...



A similar reaction happens in the tap water with the acid breaking down into the fluoride salts so that what you are drinking is fluoride ions at the end of the day. How they want to arrange themselves is up to them.

Calcium Fluoride in water is no different than Sodium Fluoride in water... except for the calcium/sodium ion content.

Why worry about drinking water if we're living in a sea of radiation?

For those who oppose water fluoridation I would be interested to know why, why do you believe it to be a bad thing?

3 PHd's beg to differ, one of them at least has a PHD in chemistry and spent his career specialising in toxicology.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Case-Against-Flu...s/dp/1603582878

Needs more clarification on whether dumping into rivers/atmosphere is a concentration issue.

How do you mean? They're just not allowed to do it because of it's illegal, apparently it kills everything for miles around. Of course once it's been run through a 'human filter' it ends up there eventually but I suspect that at the rate it calcifies everything it comes in contact with in your body there's not much dangerous stuff left. :)

If I piss into a cup on your kitchen bench, you're going to notice it, but if I piss into a stream that services an aquifer that you draw water from via a bore or whatever, you're probably not going to notice it.

Chemical leaks into streams tend to be big dumps all at once, which produces some nasty concentrations. Dispersed into a city's drinking reservoir and it's going to be at a much much lower dosage.

So it is a concentration issue? Dumping table salt into a river would be equally as illegal. Heck I want to see them disperse any of the fluoride chemicals into the air... like you suggest they are not allowed to. It would mostly look like a dude throwing powder up or spraying a hose of acid into the air. Thoroughly amusing.

Also the argument from authority doesn't hold any weight. They can have PhDs and be wrong. Especially Paul Connett who has made his career on anti fluoridation.

You linked me to the equivalent of a Michael Moore documentary, and didn't take anything else out of my post, so I guess you have no more 'evidence' to support your side.

Here I leave you with a relevant comic.


(Fluoride is added to a concentration around 1mg/L to the local water supply. Normally lower. Which is a lot smaller dose than Director's river dumping scenario.)

The cons outweigh the pros.

The jury is out on just what the long-term effects are inside the body.
Sure, we have some other instances of "medication by stealth" like iodine in salt and Omega 3 in bread but at least there's not question marks hanging over them and opting out is easy.

To say there's people that can't afford toothpaste in Australia is laughable. I stocked up on the half price stuff @ $1 a tube so essentially have over a year's supply for under 10 bucks.

You could argue (probably successfully) that the small amount of toothpaste you inadvertently swallow gives the highest dose of all potential sources, but again at least you have the choice of using alternatives that don't contain the stuff.

Do they though? Apart from tooth mottling what are the cons?

There is more good quality evidence indicating safety than there are question marks. What long term effects were you concerned about?



For those that consider water fluoridation a bad thing how do you feel about food fortification?

Also just to be clear Australian flour is not fortified with fatty acids (Omega 3 or otherwise). You may be thinking of Folic acid.

And the effects are cumulative, so even studies done at less than 1ppm have shown the effects that this stuff has. In other words, it builds up in your system and does damage over time.

Evidence of that claim? Because so far nothing I have read shows anything like that.

Making shit up doesn't help your case.

Did you read the book I linked you to?

unlike the rather less protracted death from say, cholera or typhoid

yes, those industriochemical cartels are really out to sell us something we can live better off without

Yes Scruffy but doesn't chlorine remove most if not all of those, plus boiling water some places of course,

Fluorine is, I think somewhat different, not there to kill pathogens.

Cheers

I'm not sure how that relates to anything? They put chlorine into the water to kill those kinds of bugs. Sodium fluorosilicate is added to medicate the person drinking the water and not to treat the water itself.


(beaten by ChrisG. :) )

d'oh !

never trust a sick doctor (i'm a little unwell myself presently) and i have my halogens confused after reading this last night late and then having my brain in neutral this afternoon (when i eventually got out of bed)

you are of course correct, although fluoride has been helpful in reducing dental decay... that's where i'll leave it to you guys

Hmm,

Scruffy is however a doc, I'm very interested to hear what he has to say.

I also had a thought I want to do some research on - what happens chemically when you put TWO halogens, one as a compound, into H2O?

Cheers

Edit: Sorry to hear Scruff - get better soon - I always wonder about your profession in that regard - my view is there are three disease centrals, doctors surgeries, hospitals and schools :)

Director, your directing me to reading that books is effectively posting a link of loose change and telling me to watch that for 9/11 info.

I'd prefer links to studies showing those claims rather than tripe like that book made to make money of misinforming people.

OK sure, there's plenty of them out there and I'm sure you can google as well as I can. See the thing is that if I post a few here it'll just be more of the usual where the tiniest minutia is highlighted and used to dismiss the whole thing. in the end though there are plenty of studies showing this stuff is dangerous and none that I've found to say it's not. I mean geez I have the MSDS right in front of me that I got from the local council and it states quite clearly that this stuff is an S6 poison, toxic on contact, toxic if swallowed (lols), CUMULATIVE EFFECTS MAY RESULT FOLLOWING EXPOSURE, evidence of carcinogenic effect, keep away from food, drink and animal feedstuff etc. And all of that is from the company that makes the stuff. You can make up your own mind but I have no doubts whatsoever. :)

How do you get it out of your food, assuming it has been washed in tap water at least once?

Also, MAY? Some medication on said a possible side effect may be spontaneous orgasm. Pretty sure I would still be on it if that may had played out as a will.

I read this and thought:



Seriously though guys your worrying about Fluoride being added to water... There aren't enough things to worry about that are so much worse. I would know I'm in my down phase of what has now been thought to be bi-polar depression...Yay! New meds to try -__-...

I don't doubt you have the MSDS, but that is not evidence of those claims. I have looked for these studies you refer to. Most of them I have found aren't what you are claiming they show. So now I am just asking you to find the ones that do refer to your claims, especially about long term exposure.

Also... I have had a look at a few MSDS available online for Fluoroscillic Acid and Sodium Fluoride. I'm not seeing anything close to what you have on your one. I am seeing the standard toxic acid stuff for the fluoroscillic acid, but I am not seeing any carcinogen comments including on the sodium fluoride.

Who put out your MSDS?

It's the one that the local council sent me.

Here's the Link.

You have to be fucking kidding!

from that MSDS - Sodium Flourosilicate, used in flouridation of water



And some people still think this is OK to put in our drinking water?

:)

Whilst sometimes I think D can be just a LITTLE extreme, on this subject, although I do use a fluoride toothpaste I completely and utterly agree and what Antraman just quoted is but one of the reasons.

Cheers