The week before Will was born, we occupied ourselves with random projects. One of them was the brainchild of my boyfriend. It started rather simply. The light on the inside of our fridge indicated that our water filter needed replaced. You see, our fancy fridge…ok…fancy-for-Georgia fridge has one of those built in water filtration systems and it’s ready for it’s closeup.
Bam. And I love, love, love that it has it’s own filtration system and we don’t have to clog precious sweet tea shelf space with a Brita water pitcher (which is what happens to my parents fridge). I mostly love it because I got great peace of mind thinking that our ice was filtered. No anenemies here 🙂
Well…the indicator light told us it was time to switch out the filter. So Jeremy removed the old filter from the hole in the bottom of the fridge and suggested that we take a peek inside. Except not with those words…he’s manly…and manly men don’t “peek inside”…they rip the thing open with their bare hands or with their teeth.
or they strap the thing to a cinder block and get out the sawzall.
You can imagine my delight 🙂
And for those girlie girls out there who don’t know what a sawzall is…it’s awesome. Basically it’s one of our favorite tools. It’s a Dewalt reciprocating saw that has interchangable blades for cutting through just about anything. It’s totally manly. If it were a living thing, it would have a penis. Sorry mom.
So Jeremy whipped out the sawzall and got to work cutting into the water filter.
I would like to take a break now in our experiment and say three things.
1. Our hypothesis was that the water filter was a basic tube filled with a sponge like mechanism that was heavy laden with dirt and biohazardous material.
2. Don’t try this at home.
3. My man has some sexy calf muscles. Mmmm.
So once he sliced the sucker open, we saw a black tubie thingy wrapped in thin paper.
No sponge. Hypothesis incorrect. The black tubie thingy is actually an activated carbon microfilter according to PUR. Basically the water flows through the paper and then through the tubie and then out the tip all nice and clean.
The paper removes the sediments in the water. And there were LOTS of gross sediments.
And the black tubie removes contaminents such as microbial cysts, sediments, chlorine taste and odor, agricultural and industrial pollutants and lots of other byproducts.
Pretty gross, huh?
When we removed the tubie outta the other end, we were better able to remove the paper and check out the grossness that we were not ingesting. You see…this:
came outta this:
and when we wiped our finger around the inside of the blue thing…we found this:
Eww.
Yeah.
I was moving all 205 lbs of me to make sure the new filter was in place ready to go. Pretty nasty stuff if you ask me. And you can bet your bottom dollar…heck, bet your top dollar, that I will be sure to get all my drinking water from the fridge from now on.
So did you enjoy our experiment as much as we did? Anyone else out there paranoid about their drinking water? Or maybe you are shocked at the amount of grossness we discovered? Or perhaps you are still staring at my boyfriend’s legs….well, stop. those belong to me 🙂
Katie! We just bought a Zero Water filter pitcher on a friend’s recommendation that comes with a digital tester to see what’s left in the water after it’s filtered. We tested our Brita water vs. the Zero Water pitcher and the Brita barely took out anything, while the Zero water pitcher took out every last dissolved particle, much to our amazement. Our tap water measured in the 450 range and the new Brita filter only took it down to a 420, while the ZeroWater took it to a 0. You might want to think about a Zero Water because those other types barely filter a thing! I was amazed because I’d used a Brita or a PUR my whole life and to think what a waste of money and false sense of security they were. Now I sound like an infomercial. But, it may be worth it for you, especially for the little guy’s bottles or eventual glass of water. I have nothing to do with any water filter company, I’m just a girl in Texas with formerly crappy tap water.
Love your blog!
Jessica
whenever we changed our filter..the water with the new filter in place always tasted extremely extremely bad! We had to drain a lot of water out to get it tasting normal again! I don’t know why though.. anyone else have this problem?
This is completely unrelated but…
is Will’s nursery done yet? (unless you already posted it and I completely missed it)
🙂
Amy –
It is done. I’ve just been swamped with the posts to write and too little time to write them. I promise I’ll post photos soon though!
XO – katie
hey there! It’s pretty awesome! I lived in Japan for a few years and you can actually buy the little block of carbon and you just put them on the bottom of the pitcher. It dos basically the same thing. I love finding out what’s inside of things! I am def a how it’s made fan.
LMAO & OMG that’s nasty.
::running to buy a replacement filter and bust out the sawsall and vise to see what’s been living in our old filter::
Ewie…now I REALLY want a fridge with the water purifier!
I would never have thought to do that but thanks for showing us the total nastiness. We have the same kind of filters for our fridge.
heather
Thank goodness for filters. This stuff is NAYYSTYYY.
Oh yuck. That is gross. I am a little jealous of your fancy-for-Georgia fridge. I have the Brita pitcher and it takes up so much space. It’s worth it though!
dhhamlin.wordpress.com
Ewwww! You learn something new every day 😉 This is random but I keep wondering when I buzz over to your site if Will’s cutie-pie face is going to join you & the boyfriend’s on your banner/header/thingymajigy (I don’t speak blog, sorry) 🙂
the fridge that came with our house when we bought it late 2008 had an ice maker (yay!) but didn’t have a water filter (boo!) and it’d been out of use so long that the mechanical parts in the ice maker were starting to rust! that meant little flecks of oxidized steel found at the bottom of our drinks for a while. the new fridge we wanted wasn’t cheap, but we saved up, waited for a sale, and have been happily slurping sediment-free drinks for the past 6 months! WAHOO for built-in water filters and non-rusty parts!
UGH! That almost made me gag!
Forget about the sexy calves I love that he’s wearing a Red Sox hat! Go Sox!
Hope you’re enjoying being a new mom! (And your new little Sox fan.)
GROSS!
Speaking of gross, where is the rest of the birth story??? (Kidding… well, kidding about the gross part. Not kidding about the rest of the birth story being long overdue.)
Ewww….our filter light is on. Time to order a new one before the baby arrives so icky sediment doesn’t end up in his formula!
ummm that is nasty.
Oh, also, the hubs and I lived in Virginia for years {graduated from Liberty University} and I have been having a maaaaajor craving for some Southern Sweet Tea! Mind sharing your go-to recipe??
Natalie, I wish I could help but I am not the sweet tea mixer in our family. I think my boyfriend uses one of those sweet tea brewers that has it’s own pitcher. And I am pretty sure he prefers Lipton. with lots and lots of sugar.
XO – Katie
why did this whole post make me think of gremlins?
is it something i know should have never been done (like feeding a mogwai after midnight) but you just have to do it to see what happens even if the out come is scary?
i’m going to pretend the water filter in MY fridge contains rainbows and sparkles. 😉
Your new design is awesome! Blogger, Mommy AND Graphic Designer.
My husband and I use to live in a small down in an apartment from the 1950s. Seriously. It still had the original countertops in the kitchen and bathroom. Plus the original flooring in the bathroom. Well anyway, the water from the tap came out murky brown! You could litterally see things floating in it. We purchased a water filter for the facet and a filtered pitched for the frig. Our water was filtered twice before it was consumed. It was crystal clear after the second filter and could have been passed off as bottled water.
So glad we don’t have to deal with that in our house!! That’s manly b/c we live in the big city now. 🙂
Hi there! Here’s a fridge filter tip for your readers: our fridge repair guy said that you should always change the filter every 6 months regardless of what the indicator light shows. he explained that power outages and surges make the indicator light reset so that it might not always be accurate.
Really good post, i read it all. It is good informative knowledge 🙂
if you follow the instructions on your filter you are supposed to run water through your new filter for four minutes (per my filter) some request certain amount of water be run through it.
I have a Zero too and it preforms the same.
Hmm, Look dirty. How about membrane in a filter of Water filter system.
calcium, magnesium, potassium, etc. are mostly what make up total dissolved solids. these are minerals your body needs. pur and brita do not remove these minerals. any difference you see in a TDS reduction may be from lead, arsenic, etc. removal. the only potential benefit of zero water over pur or brita would be the removal of fluoride, if you’re concerned about it. otherwise, zero water does not remove VOCs, pesticides, pharmaceuticals, trihalomethanes, (pur does) yet does remove beneficial minerals. essentially zero what creates nutrient deficient water while leaving behind load of more concerning contaminants. some research has shown consuming water devoid of minerals can actually cause minerals to leach out of your body. prior to choosing a filter, it’s worth verifying their claims on the NSF website:
http://info.nsf.org/Certified/DWTU/