There is chlorine inside Your drinking water, USA. Or maybe there is a chlorine compound called chloramine. It's not to shock you, although it certainly shocks many people. The entire industry of faucets and countertops and shower filters is exclusively available to remove the chlorides you drink and bathe, whether for health, flavor or aesthetic reasons.
After all, chlorine has bad taste and smell. Some people are sensitive to their fragrance even if they are small. It may mess up your hair dye and dry your skin. Also, few people Really If you ask them, want to drink chlorine. Therefore, water filters like Wired's best test shower filters, canopy filtered shower heads are designed to remove chlorine before.
But please note that chlorine should be there exactly. The Centers for Disease Control says water chlorination is one of the biggest public health advances in the 20th century, as well as obscure triumphs such as "penicillin" and "polio vaccines."
The concentration of chlorine or chlorine compounds is usually very low, usually about 1 part per million (below the Environmental Protection Agency's acceptable limit on human consumption) to kill water pipes to kill potential bacteria such as potential bacteria that may grow in water and shorten your life or allow it to grow briefly. Household filters are designed to remove chlorine after chlorine is done in the pipeline.
However, if you do buy a filter for drinking or shower water, there is a complicated factor. More than half of the U.S. big cities do not use chlorine, partly because free chlorine in water is highly reactive, has a short half-life, and can interact with other substances to produce harmful compounds considered carcinogenic. Instead, more than half of the country's largest cities use chloramine, a more stable and sustained chloride.
If you are trying to filter out chlorine compounds, what kind of compounds are being used in your city. New York, Atlanta and Chicago use chlorine in their water systems. But Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Boston use chloramine in water.
Chloramine has some potential advantages over chlorine. It is generally believed that the aroma is not very obvious in drinking water. The longer half-life of chloramine, and the persistence of durability in the pipeline also means that health authorities can use lower quantities and still maintain the levels required to disinfect the pipeline.
However, the relative stability of chloramine may also make it harder to filter out of water than pure chlorine, especially with shower water filters that rely on chemical reactions to neutralize chlorine. Although chloramine oxidizes relatively quickly in the open air when exposed to light, brewers in cities using chloramine often use chemical tablets to neutralize chloramine.
Photo: Matthew Korfhage