Your easy guide . . . how to find a safe home water purification system that protects your kids

If you're like I used to be, you know you need a water purification system, but are a little unsure of what type is best for you.

Relax. You're in good company. I'll help you sort that out -- quickly and easily. Pour yourself a coffee if you'd like to. Settle back and I'll tell you in plain, no-hype, easy language the simple essential things you need to know.

Any good drinking water purification system must do four things. So your job is to see if the system you're considering does them all. I know one that does. And at the bottom I'll point you to it. But you have a look around and choose for yourself the one you think is best and the most value for your money.

Filter out mud and dirt, and kill bacteria and small organism

If your family drinks from a government or municipal water supply this will have been done for you before you turn on your tap. The officials at your local water treatment plant are required by law to take water from good sources, filter it using large, industrial-scale plant like sand beds, remove some chemicals, and treat it with chlorine to kill some micro-organisms. After this it is good enough to use used by businesses and industry.

The government and local authorities are always busy repairing their plant and trying to keep up with demand. It's thought this work on the aging community infrastructure here in the US over the next 20 years will be as high as $1 trillion.

Next thing is to take out the chemicals which slipped through your city water treatment "purifiers". Your tap water will have chemicals in it. The Ralph Nader organization recently used Freedom of Information legislation to go through classified documents from the EPA, and found water officials had records showing over 2100 cancer-causing chemicals have been found in public water supplies across the US. Yet government regulations require your local water guardians to only check for 75 of these.

You will need a purification system at your tap that uses mechanical filtering techniques to remove chemicals before your kids drink them.

Metals will also need to be taken out at your tap. But only the harmful ones, and not the essential trace minerals in water which your body needs to work properly. So lead, for example, has to be removed from your water. But you have to keep magnesium, sulfates, calcium, iron and those other life-giving, natural minerals which were dissolved out of rocks deep underground and moved up into our water supplies where we can get them by drinking water at the end of this amazing cycle of nature.

A technique such as ion exchange will remove harmful metals and yet retain the essential minerals.

Finally, the system must remove the cysts and other micro organisms that give village kids in poor countries vile, frothy, yellow stools. Cysts are highly lethal carriers of gastro illnesses and we should work hard to keep them away from our children.

Some cysts have become resistant to the chlorine used at your local water treatment plant, so you'll need a sub micron filter to take them out of your tap water.

Those are the performance benchmarks for a good water purifier. So, let's consider some options.

Bottled water is often held up as the shortcut to giving a family healthy water. But not only is this expensive, and adding to the mountain of empty plastic bottles in landfills, US government regulations only require that bottled water meet the same standards as tap water. You know how impure tap water is. And actually the FDA itself says, "Companies that market bottled water as being safer than tap water are defrauding the American public."

Other people are tempted to buy an expensive reverse osmosis home purification system. Well, they are popular, but so are some dubious brands of vacuum cleaners. And the thing the reverse osmosis salesman will only tell you when you prize it out of him with a crowbar is that the system filters out all the healthy natural essential trace minerals like magnesium and calcium. Reverse osmosis water is sterile water! Also, these reverse osmosis purifiers can't stop all the cancer-causing chemicals. Ask the salesman and he'll admit this.

What I would do is find a good brand from a reputable company that actually delivers pure, healthy water at a good price. I have found one. It's Aquasana, in Fort Worth, Texas. In fact, dollar for dollar, no-one does water purifying better than Aquasana. The Consumer digest has voted them "Best Buy" five years running, and I stand by them.

If you're like me you're on a budget. Well, Aquasana has products for all budget ranges.

1.) They sell products just for filtering shower water. Put one of these in your bathroom and its like showering in natural spring water!
2.) They sell water filters that manage individual faucets, such as your kitchen faucet where you prepare all your food and draw drinking water for the kids.
3.) They sell individual glass bottle filters. These you can take anywhere in place of expensive plastic bottled water.
4.) And, as you'd expect, they sell a top-rated, whole-house water purifier and filter.

Visit their site now (click here) and find out why I, and tens of thousands of other educated consumers, consider Aquasana to be not only the best dollar for dollar buy, but the best products over all regardless of price.