Is the Berkey Water Filter Worth It? (Independent Test Results!)

hello it's cami here from the blog tidbits at tibbetts camry.com all right you've heard me sing my praises for my berkey water filter but after receiving some opinionated comments about the berkey on my videos i decided i just needed to know so i have sent three samples out to an independent laboratory to test my water first directly from the wellhead second after i had been through our whole house water filtration system and into the kitchen faucet and lastly through the berkey water filter now i am going to be completely transparent and share the process and my results and finally what i think about the berkey after seeing it all now seeing slightly negative comments on my brookie videos um that i've done really caused me to think having my family drink healthy and clean water is super important to me especially after all that i've learned and researched about what can be potentially harmful to our health in our water sources but i didn't want to live with a sense of false security feeling like the berkey was the answer to all of our problems and delivered my family wonderfully clean water if in fact it wasn't additionally i kind of felt a bit of a moral obligation to actually know what i was recording know if i was recommending something to you that was or wasn't as valuable as i believed it to be so i decided to do some homework and truly find out for myself what was in our water and just avoid all the controversy controversial articles that were readily available out there about water filters online i hope this is valuable to you definitely stick around for my results and my humble opinion after knowing what i now know i do apologize this video might get a little bit on the longer side just to cover everything i want to tell you if you need to skip check the clickable timestamps in the description but i think you'll find digging into my results pretty interesting now if you want to slow it down and dig deeper i'll be sharing screenshots of my results on my blog for you to look even closer at and then you can check the link in the description for all those links now first i want to be very transparent about the company that i decided to use for testing my water i learned about a few options but finally decided to reach out to a company called tapscore to help me with this now i told them about our water situation which you'll see more of as i show you my testing process but they were super intrigued themselves since our water situation is fairly unique i want to be sure you know this post is not sponsored by berkey or tapscore but after learning what i wanted to do tapscore actually offered to send me three tests so that i could test from each source and better understand what was going on they were amazing to jump onto zoom calls with me and prepare me for the process and discuss the results i'm still not a water pro but i understand it all so much better after having their help they have amazing customer service what i think is really awesome about tap scores they're actually like a middleman so to speak so they send the water to independent certified laboratories so they don't actually test themselves and they don't benefit at all from what your results do or do not say they just have provided the amazing testing kits the learning system and their knowledge to kind of help us know how to test our water and then decipher the complicated lab results and kind of put them into layman's terms basically so that we can understand them better so it's peace of mind to me that i picked a company that's not profiting from any filtration product or swaying the results so that's a little bit about tap score i think they're amazing at helping us understand our water and i highly recommend looking into them if you want to test your water as well i did set up an affiliate account with them and i'll leave a link below if you want to learn more i will say it's always an option to get your water tested for free or i think for very minimal charge through the county or city you live in i believe i grew up always helping my mom test our well water frequently and turning it into the county i believe those tests are a lot more basic and don't quite test as much but it can give you a really good baseline to go off of to see if you need to do further in-depth testing so i highly recommend looking into those services for your area as well tapscore has a lot of testing options you can kind of click what source you have whether that's private well or city water then select a level of testing based on what you're concerned about or what you want to test for i'll leave a link in the description to the test that i took personally i like that you can get very specific or general if you're concerned about vocs mold radiation pesticides and all sorts of scary things that might be a concern in your area you can select just those tests you could also ask them something like we have 100 year old pipes or we live in new york city what should we test for that might be helpful for you to just start there okay i want you to see the process i took for testing our water now we have well water and you might have that as well or you might be on city water regardless understanding what is coming out of each source and then into your copper body i think is very valuable information so i first wanted to know what was in our well water directly from the wellhead we knew right away after digging our well that our water had high iron content that affected the taste and smell and we had to install a whole house green sand water filtration system and we were pretty sure we had a very hard water so we installed a water softener as well but i wanted to actually know if it was dangerous to our health and if the whole house filled tracing filtration system was actually doing what we were told it would do after paying for a fairly expensive filter so using the instructions in the tap score kit i pulled the water from the well in the morning collecting two samples first from the first straw before any taps had run and then the second bottle if after it had run for five minutes now i learned that the first straw is so that they can test if your pipes are contaminating the water and the fully flushed draw is to discover if it's the water source itself that's going to contain that's contaminated you can just follow the instructions since tapscore makes it so clear and easy to do after the water samples were gathered i sent it in with the cold pack that they sent there was also like a sample just dip test that i just took an image of and sent that in so that they could decipher those results and the second source i wanted to draw from was our kitchen faucet we didn't always drink or cook from the berkey and quite frankly i wanted to know what the whole house filtration process was doing and if we even needed the third filtration which is the rookie so i grabbed the needed samples from the kitchen faucet which is essentially the same water that goes through you know the whole house and into the bathroom faucets as well so the last thing i pulled samples from was the berkey in the exact same manner in which we use it to fill our cups and drink from next i filled out the card with all my info i set up my online account with top score and then just went to the post office and sent all the testing kits in with a prepaid label and then just waited a couple weeks for the results okay here is where it gets interesting right so let's take a look at the results so i logged onto simple lab where i got the testing results first let's look at the results from the wellhead as an overview you can see that it scored 67 out of 99. the plumbing score is pretty good the aesthetics are poor obviously because it smells terrible and stains everything yellow if we didn't filter it and the water health isn't super great um the overview view also clarifies that they detected elevated lithium in our well water so i love that they have this overview but you can still dig further i'll show you quickly you can like see what the lithium is the highest concern and what is nice about tap score is you can then click on any element and learn more about your levels and how exactly it may impact your health if left untreated or if they're fine where they're at now after reading this i felt like our levels of lithium were not concerning this is definitely something extra that you get rather than just using a basic test from your countier area i wouldn't have a clue personally what healthy levels of anything was in those elements so these features are really amazing i can see how much fluoride is naturally in our water and if your city adds extra floor that you're concerned about you could see the exact levels i can clearly see from the results that the iron and magnesium levels are elevated affecting the taste and color the hardness is ridiculously high in our well water and would definitely affect our plumbing and fixtures over time if not treated now there are a lot of elements in info to digest here but i was mostly concerned about e coli and coliform since they actually detected some when they drilled the well and we had to bleach the well and pipes for that this process i was told is called shocking a well i'll leave a link to a great article about that from tapscore that i found i guess that is mainly why i was using the berkey blindly because i didn't know if those were gone from our first treatment so i just assumed it was better safe than sorry so it was great to see that those were not detected from the wellhead anymore i will say when i talked to tapscore they actually said my well water was pretty darn good in comparison to others perhaps because it's fairly new well and perhaps because we're on 25 acres of virgin land but it's apparently pretty good levels but they still recommended testing my private well like once or twice a year because bacteria can return and since our private water isn't being monitored by any city or company it's kind of up to us to do so now i want to show you one more cool feature inside simple lab you can click on treatment and it will recommend treatments based on your test results with potential cost it's interesting that they recommended a reverse osmosis system for us but our local water guy led us to the green sand filtration he said a reverse osmosis system would work but was probably overkill it was more than we needed so let's take a look and see if it actually works okay here are the results for the water running out of the kitchen sink which are extremely interesting the score is actually lower with a 45 out of 99. now that was a little depressing to see but they helped walk me through why this might be and call my concerns the levels i was particularly interested to see in to see if our green sand filter was actually doing its job was the iron and magnesium so i can see here that iron wasn't detected at all in the kitchen sink and magnesium went from a 29.87 ppm to a .09 so that was very good to see the green sand filter definitely helps get the smell and the funky iron taste out of our water and doesn't leave all the fixtures yellow which we definitely noticed just visually with the difference i also wanted to know what the hardness levels to see if the water softener was doing anything now the well levels were in the 200s ppm and the kitchen sink test showed at around 0.6 so huge improvement in hardness so much better for our skin our hair our plumbing and all of that now the sodium is higher due to the softener and i just just don't know if that is a concern or if my levels are concerning and that's some research that i would like to still do if you know anything about sodium and water just let me know anyway so it seemed like all the levels really improved to the kitchen sink so why such lower scores and it comes down to this little detection of coliform which is a bacteria and i clicked on it to learn a little bit more about it and then i spoke with my hubs and tap score and we determined it could be detected because we had run water through the pipes and the filtration system before we bleach the well so perhaps a little remains in the system and needs to still flush itself out tapster also said that could it could even be the result of bacteria built up on the faucet head it's pretty harmless but it was just detected they felt encouraged because it wasn't in the well water so whatever was causing the detection is most likely harmless and i think if we've been using this water for two years and haven't gotten sick i really don't need to worry about it much in our situation e coli wasn't detected so that was um reinforcing and good to know all right now finally what happens to my water once it runs through the berkey filters let's take a look the overall score went to an 87 out of 99 which is much higher than the sink and wellhead lithium went from point zero three to point zero one fluoride is about the same because i don't have fluorine filters on my berkey because well we have well water and fluoride isn't added the hardness went down still a little bit even more from the kitchen sink from 0.6 to 0.3 magnesium from .09 to 0.03 sodium just slightly lower so it doesn't seem that the berkey filters out much sodium so it's just good to know what the berkey is capable of it was interesting to note that copper iron zinc and other metals that were detected in the well and the kitchen faucet even though they appear to be perfectly healthy levels it was not detected in the berkey water do we need a little bit of those in our water or something we should all learn but does the berkey successfully filter metals out it appears so from my results and you can look on the berkey site and see what elements they claim to be able to filter out i'll leave a link to that page if you want to look at it so i was definitely interested in the coliform from the berkey and the results say that it was not detected here even though it was in the kitchen faucet so that's good so for the aesthetics of the berkey water the concern is that it might taste salty because of the sodium levels we don't notice it from the well the taste was marked with iron and magnesium concerns the kitchen sink the aesthetics showed that sodium and chloroform may affect the taste and compared to the berkey sodium is the only concern albeit a little lower than the kitchen sink now again head to my blog if you want a closer look at these results all right is the berkey worth buying would i still recommend after testing that was a lot of information but knowing what i now know um the question do i still recommend it now this is what i now recommend with my whole heart it's to test your water find out and see what kind of health concerns are in your water and then go from there you may not need a filter if your water comes back with healthy levels or you may find you need a much more extensive filter um like a whole house filter like ourselves or maybe you have city water and you get it tested and it detects high levels of chlorine or vocs or fluoride all that stuff that we don't want to be drinking in high dosage and your only choice is to get something like a countertop or a faucet or a fridge filter so basically i'm saying before you just jump to buy any filter know what your situation is first and then start researching what exactly you need filtered out and what filter will do the job that being said based on my experience i still highly recommend the berkey i got it first when we were on city water i didn't know i should test my water and see what was in it but i knew it was often cloudy and tasted terrible that's when i got the berkey and it 100 improved the taste then and we still now prefer the clean yummy taste from the berkey versus our sink and maybe it's in my head but the stink water still tastes a bit medley so i just prefer drinking out of the berkey i can see that it successfully took out any detection of coliform which i also don't worry too much if my kids are drinking out of the faucet anymore on occasion and i don't mind cooking with our sink water now that i know what is and isn't in it i still like how the berkey looks on your countertop it makes water drinking more appealing and convenient it's kind of like having a drinking fountain in the house i personally love room temperature water i feel like we all drink more water because of it so all this in consideration it's still a win for me especially considering emergency preparedness i feel pretty good trusting that the berkey would take out harmful elements if our water source was tainted or if we had to drink from a stream or something overall knowing is half the battle so figure out what's in your water and go from there i don't recommend spending money needlessly be informed and maybe even test your water after you choose to filter it with whatever and if it doesn't do what the company says it does ask for a refund with your testing proof i think that might be a good approach rather than just getting lost in skeptical internet articles and comments anyway thanks a ton for watching i know it was kind of long but i hope it was enlightening as this whole experience has definitely been for me you can watch my other burke videos if you would like um i did one on the reasons why buying a berkey is a good idea which haven't changed for me even after testing so i also did a video on 10 berkey water filter mistakes to avoid and all the links to the products i've talked about are below in the description with any coupon codes that might be relevant at the time all right i'll be back to share more inspiration for do-it-yourself living um and if you're not already subscribed for my channel i would absolutely love it for you to do so i would love to hear your feedback after watching this video and anything else that you've learned about water and filtering water and water filter products and all the above i think it would be a fun and helpful conversation to just keep going so thanks again for watching and i will talk to you soon [Music]

Channel: TIDBITS

Views: 41,232

Keywords: water filter system for home, water filter installation, berkey water filter, berkey water filter setup, berkey water filter review, fluoride filter berkey, fluoride filter water, fluoride filter, water tester for drinking water, water testing kits for drinking water, tap score water testing, laboratory water test, water filtration system, water filter for families, best water filter for home, best water filter system, best water filtration system, healthiest water to drink

Id: z3JwjN27dTE

Length: 18min 38sec (1118 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 13 2022