$258 is cheaper than $26 - Berkey Water Filter vs Brita Water Filter

today I want to talk about the berkey water filter the Berkey is something that our family has used for almost seven years now we're really really happy with it I think when people start looking at water filters there's things like Britta's that we use to use a Brita you know years and years ago they're pretty popular a lot of people have them in their fridge when you look at something like a Berkey and you see the price tag perky's most popular model is their big berkey and it's $258 I think people kind of go whoa I don't think I needed that kind of water filter that badly one of the things that we've used our berkeley for when we were traveling around we were camping in national forests and we had our Berkey with us the whole time and we just made sure that we would camp near a river or a stream instead of lugging around bottled water buying bottled water dealing with plastic waste from that we just used our Berkey we scooped water out of whatever stream or river we were near by run it through our Berkey and in several months of doing that we never had a single issue with water we weren't having to boil we weren't using iodine tablets we were just running it through our Berkey a lot of people do store water in their home and it's a phenomenal idea it's a great thing to do everywhere we've ever lived we've always been relatively close to some source of water some kind of a stream or a lake a pond for us though we also always recognize that we had the option of well if we absolutely had to we could just go down to the pond down the road and scoop some water out and throw it through the Berkey I think when people look at water filters and they think okay that's great that filter will work with that kind of dirty water but that's a big price tag and it's just not what you know what we need they want to run their tap water through something and so they're running it through like a Brita and I think even if you're not looking at the Berkey or looking at a water filter in terms of really substantial purification there's still a case to be made for the Berkey when we were first looking at it we've been using Brita filters and running tap water thrown and I think you can get a Brita filter on Amazon for like twenty six dollars they've got you know the replacement 3-pack for something like fifteen dollars there's of course the plastic waste issue you're taking out that filter tossing it and putting a new one in at a pretty regular interval Britta says for those filters they last something like two months for the for the average family of using 40 gallons in our experience already using and we realized that we knew we were having to change them more often than what Britta says we go through conservatively two gallons a day we have a three gallon model and we have to fill it all the way up just about every single day there's still some water and it's sometimes so conservatively I would say we do two gallons a day that 40 gallons Britta says is average for two months we do that in 20 days at that interval that 3-pack is lasting us 60 days so two months so we would need six of those three packs to make it through a year that's like $90 a year you can see when you compare that to the upfront cost of the Berkey at $258 now there's not quite such a big disparity the Berkey just has that big upfront cost whereas the Britta kind of slowly nickels and dimes you I mentioned earlier we've been using our Brita for almost seven years we haven't spent a penny on it in that time other than the initial purchase price we've kind of calculated based on our water usage that the filter should last us around eight years so we've got another year or so to go maybe it'll go longer when it is time for us to replace those filters the replacement Berkey filters are 107 dollars and that should last us another roughly eight years again comparing that to something like the Brita there's still that $90 a year ongoing ongoing for the entire time that you're ever using a Brita so when you look at it that way if we've been using a Brita all this time we would have actually spent way more money than we ever spent on our Berkey and we could not have used a Brita in the way that we've been able to use a Berkey Brita says there's running ordinary tap water through so basically hey put clean water in and we'll filter it whereas Berkey they're saying you know non potable non healthy water you can run through it from our experience and you can anybody who's looking at something like a Burkean going yeah yeah it's probably a pretty good filter I get that but I'm not spending that kind of money on a filter compared to other things even way less your standard filters it's actually really inexpensive when you start breaking it down because it's just that one an initial big purchase and then it's extremely cheap over its lifetime and you get the added benefit of it's not just filtering it's purifying you can run some seriously dirty stuff through this when we were scooping river water out and dumping it in here that was like green water with little Wiggly things in there the top chamber on this got gross but the bottom chamber crystal-clear water every time it's really a phenomenal purchase I do have some complaints that I want to get it to and actually complaints isn't really the right word it's more of issues with usage style if you have this sitting on your kitchen counter which is what it does most of the time for us it's phenomenal I don't have a single complaint it just it works it's great if you're using it in sort of a travelling setting then there are some things that it would be awesome if Berkey could adjust about the stainless steel container I doubt it'll ever come to anything it's not like work he's paying attention to me so I mentioned that the top chamber is gonna get pretty dirty if you're running dirty water through it it makes sense right the way the Berkey works is you've got this top chamber with the black filter elements inside and it just gravity feeds through those filter elements into your lower chamber right now we're in a house running tap water through it so it's pretty clean but it's still surprising what starts to collect even just running tap water through there kind of shows you that your tap water got a lot more in it than you realize Berkey they advertise the fact that when you want to kind of store it or put it away this top chamber slides down into the lower chamber I have some water in the bottom chamber so I don't really want to pour it all the way in but it it goes all the way down to where you can see the kind of this this lip that sticks out so it sits in there kind of like that so it does make it a lot more compact we were traveling around in a pickup truck we had a camper cover on the back we were going down dirt roads and things like that a lot and even the inside back of the truck got absolutely filthy one thing that would happen is our Berkey would get covered in dust and this is the clean side so when it's sitting in here like this you kind of have what's supposed to be the clean side exposed and these two spots here are where your clean water is coming out and now you've got dust settling down inside there one thing that I think would have been awesome is if there was some way for the lid to go on there and and and kind of stay you know I don't know if the lip was longer on the lid so that it could come all the way down to that but basically a way to contain and close off this part so that when you are putting it away like this this is staying clean in your house if you're gonna put it in the garage just in my bed it's not a big deal you can bring it back in wash it off but when you're out on the road and you're just sort of going from one camp area to another camp area you don't really have that that luxury the other issue is when you do this and I says I said earlier if the inside of this is absolutely filthy you can go rinse it out but if the water you have to rinse it out with is dirty river water well you still have dirty potentially contaminated water and so now you're turning it upside down and all of that dirtiness is going into your lower chamber that's your clean water so what we would do and we'd get to another spot we would that's the only time we boil water is we'd scoop up whatever water we've got and boil it to make sure that anything that's in there is dead and use that to clean out the bottom chamber and at that point at least anything that's left in there is sort of neutralized now with that cleaning process then we can sort of start a new round of filtering through and I don't know how Berkey could address that one I mean I think like the lid issue would be awesome if this lid was just longer came down to here and then fit on the underside when that's upside-down flipping this inside of there I don't see any way for them to to have that not do that unless there was some kind of a plug you could put in there but it's an issue but that's it's not it's not a big issue and that was how we got around it was that's the only time we boil some water use that to clean it out so if you're at home and you're using the kitchen sink stretches over or you've got a nice pitcher or something pouring into the top is is fine if you miss for some reason the water dribbles down and kind of hits this rim right there where the two of them go together and especially with dirty water when you spill because you're using a bucket or whatever else you happen to have you didn't mean to but your kids are right there and everything's going on it's just up darn I just dribbled some down the side and now let's say you had two gallons of clean water in there and you just dribble dirty water down into it and so it's kind of like Oh do I say okay all that water is contaminated and we're just gonna toss it do I say I with such a small amount I'm not gonna worry about it but that's one thing that I don't like is that it's too easy when you're pouring dirty water and if you do spill that it starts to go in that lip those are really the only things that I would change about the birth year the only things to be aware of like I said all in all we absolutely love it when you are running dirty water through it it does get dirty and that slows down the filtration process when it does slow down your because your filters are clogged you can just take something like steel wool or a scotch brite pad or one of those anything that's really abrasive and take the filter elements out the filter elements come out really easily just the two nuts right there you unscrew them and then the filters just slide right out of there and then you can just scrub them down and that's part of how they last so long when your filters get clogged you just scrub all that gunk off the outside I would do that just using river rocks anything I found that wasn't too smooth and just scrub scrub scrub one of the Berkey says is if you ever hit a point where after cleaning them it still is filtering slowly that that's an indicator that you're kind of at the end of life of that filter and it's time to replace it they say three thousand gallons per filter element so in our case we have two in there there's room to have four if you wanted four it'll filter faster but for us with two in there that's 6,000 gallons before those filters hit we're Berkey says that they're at their end of life and I think that's though dependent highly depending on the kind of water you're running through it because I think we're probably well we're probably close to that because I was saying conservatively two thousand two gallons a day and so I think that would come out to something like eight ish years at two gallons a day to hit six thousand gallons but our filters anytime I clean them they filter really quickly afterwards but that's a nice aspect of this filter she could take him out you can scrub them down put it back in and keep going cuz they do get clogged up the absolutely if you're doing something like river water through them I was amazed how like slimy and gunky they got which is just all the stuff that you're keeping out of the water and putting into your body so they're really great we absolutely love our Berkey filter if you're even remotely thinking about filters definitely look into the Berkey steer clear of things like Britta's and all the the plastic ones because the ber keys gonna be weighed cheaper in the long run and way way more effective and if you're ever in a scenario where you don't have any option but to just grab whatever water you can find outside you can throw it in the burr key and have pretty good confidence that it's gonna be just fine for for drinking afterwards so I hope that helps anybody who's thinking about a water filter and they're not sure what to do and they're a little scared off by the price tag of a Berkey it's well worth it it's cheaper in the long run we absolutely love it and I can't recommend it highly enough I love you Berkey

Channel: PonderingParadise

Views: 283,754

Rating: 4.7857752 out of 5

Keywords: Berkey water filter, Brita water filter, water filter, camping, clean water

Id: 3F6Y3cDsSL8

Length: 11min 48sec (708 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 01 2018