Does a Whole House Water Filter Remove Calcium And Other Beneficial Minerals?

About Tap Water

While water from the tap may be the most convenient, practical and cheapest way to have drinking water, it has its downsides. Tap water can have a lot of harmful contaminants. The types and amount of contaminants present in the water depend on your location. 

While it is common knowledge that tap water isn’t all that safe to drink, it might surprise you that the majority of the US population actually drink tap water on a regular basis. Here are statistical data we found from Sustainable Brands:

• 71% of Americans drink tap water at least sometimes.
• Only 12% mentioned that they never drank tap water.
• 75% of those from higher income households ($80k+) drink tap water at least sometimes and only 53% of them are concerned about contaminants.
• 68% from lower income households (under $40k) drink tap water at least sometimes and 59% of them are concerned about contaminants.

From the statistics, we can see that there is a lack of understanding of how detrimental tap water can be to one’s health. It can also be seen that this is a normal habit regardless of income level.

If you’re actively searching for answers on what water filters remove calcium, you might already know the potential negative health impacts of tap water and may already have a whole house water filter. That or you are planning to get one. Regardless, we hope we’ve shared with you more insights regarding tap water.

Is Tap Water Safe to Drink?

A lot of people have the wrong belief that tap water is safe and clean. You only need to realize that the network of pipes span across a city and it only takes a simple leak, corrosion or damage to get the water contaminated. The water and sewer pipelines in America is 1.6 million miles. 

Even herbicides and pesticides can get into the water. Sinkholes and improper switching to a new water supply have also caused major contaminations. Moreover, millions of lead pipes are yet to be replaced. 

A national survey of lead service line occurrence published by the Journal of the American Water Works in 2016 stated that approximately 30% of the surveyed water systems have lead service lines and that there’s at least 6.1 million lead pipes across America.

Some of these pipes are more than a century old. You can only imagine its contribution to the contamination of lead in the water. Can you still say that tap water is safe to drink?

Why You Need Whole House Water Filters

While it is common knowledge that tap water isn’t ideal for drinking, a lot of people still don’t know the gravity of the potential consequences of drinking tap water. To give you an idea, here’s just some of the contaminants that may be present in your water:

Lead

Lead can cause increased blood pressure, higher incidence of hypertension, reproductive problems with both men and women, kidney problems and has been linked to cancer. Children are more vulnerable to lead than adults. Lead can cause permanent brain damage to children.

Mercury

Mercury can cause brain and kidney damage.

Cysts

These are parasites that cause intestinal issues such as diarrhea and intestinal cramps.

Iron

High amounts of iron can damage healthy skin cells. Too much iron in water can cause early onsets of wrinkles. Iron also causes staining. 

Chlorine

Can damage the hair, cause skin to dry and irritate eyes and nose.

Does a Whole House Water Filter Remove Calcium?

While whole-house water filters remove harmful contaminants in the water, it can make one question if the filters also remove beneficial minerals. This largely depends on the type of water filtration system that you choose.

With the AquaOx Whole House System, harmful contaminants are removed, but beneficial minerals remain. AquaOx whole-house filtration systems will not eliminate Calcium and Magnesium from the water. However, Calcium and Magnesium being left in the water can lead to hard water.

The significance of these beneficial minerals being left in the water is that some people can experience bodily dysfunctions such as cramps when these minerals are removed. It is also important to note that hard water is not a health hazard. If you have soft water or are seeking to remove calcium, you need to look into proper nutrition sources and supplementation to replace it.

Hard water though can cause scale buildup on appliances, plumbing fixtures and spotting on dishware. That’s why many people search for calcium water filters.

Health Effects of Calcium

Calcium in your water is actually good for you – there are studies showing that “hard” water can improve health in people who do not supplement their minerals or have healthy diets. We all know that if you want bone mass growth, you need plenty of good minerals in your diet.

Negative health effects of having too many minerals in your water do exist, though. Calcium in your water can cause skin dryness from your shower water, and excess calcium consumption

However, the minerals that make strong bones and provide joint support also make strong build-ups in your hot water heater, your washing machine water lines, and in your piping systems. The scale-forming calcium leaves a deposit known as limescale, which is difficult to clean on surfaces you can reach and nearly impossible to clean out of the inner workings of your water system.

Which Calcium Water Filter Removes Limescale?

Finding the right calcium water filter can be tricky because you don’t want to filter out the good stuff. While calcium is hard on the health of your house, it’s the toxins, purification by-products, and bacteria that are the water contaminants that are damaging to your physical health.

The best calcium water filter is going to be a reverse osmosis system, but these are generally only a drinking water filtration system and not a whole house water filter. That takes the question of “does a whole house water filter remove calcium” to a new question: what do I do about the excessive calcium that is causing scale deposits on my kitchen and bathroom surfaces and in my plumbing system?

How to Remove Calcium And Protect Those Water Heaters

House Filter Vs Water Softener

A simple solution to hard water is adding a water softener that helps to lower calcium concentrations. Water softeners work through a process of ion exchange where the magnesium and calcium ions are exchanged with sodium (or potassium) ions. Through this process, hard water is turned to softened water.

Softened water does not have traces of magnesium and calcium carbonate which means there won’t be any build-up of scale on appliances like water heaters, coffee makers, and dishwashers, damage to your home’s piping and other problems that caused by hard water.

By choosing to remove calcium from your house water, you can protect a lot of financial investment.

How Do You Remove Excess Calcium From Drinking Water?

Most water filters cannot capture the calcium that is in your tap water because it is in particles too small for typical filters. However, reverse osmosis systems and ultrafiltration systems are able to remove most calcium. A kitchen RO system, combined with a water softener, can remove calcium from water and other impurities. The calcium concentration in this case is removed through an ultrafine filtration membrane.

The best option to remove calcium, therefore, is not whole house water filters, but a water softener installed in your home. This does will replace calcium through ion exchange.

Reverse Osmosis System

Reverse osmosis filters will help with calcium filtration, but calcium removal is actually better solved through a water softener that will target calcium and magnesium to treat the water hardness. We love RO systems for a thousand reasons, but that’s a topic for another day.

Many people assume that on a municipal water supply, they have no need to soften their water, but most city water filter processes do not remove the hardness minerals that are causing the issues in your washing machines.

Do I Need To Measure Calcium Amounts?

If you are looking at adding a water softener or whole house filter system to remove calcium and other contaminants, it can be helpful to know exactly how hard your water is. There are very complex testing kits you can use to check water hardness levels, but before you dive into that round of research, it’s a good idea to check with your water treatment source if you are on a city or county water supply.

While the majority of municiple treatment plants do not soften water, most do keep track of harndess levels. Contacting your local government can be a good way to find your answers, without having to measure calcium amounts yourself.

The AquaOx Water Softener

Our water softeners are the most effective type: salt water softeners. By running your water through the salt water system, you cause the ion exchange process to take place. The calcium and magnesium in your hard water is captured in resin beads, leaving a soft water that is free of harsh minerals.

Removing calcium makes a lot more sense than trying to filter calcium. While our activated carbon water filter removes water contaminants, it is the job of water softeners to reduce calcium in water.

Conclusion

So does a whole house water filter remove calcium? The short answer is No. You Need a water softener. If you want to remove calcium concentrations from your water supply, either reverse osmosis or an ion exchange process will do the trick.

Never believe that tap water is clean and safe to drink especially when those opinions come from people who are not water experts. You might have even heard people say that “no one has ever died from drinking tap water.”

But according to the World Health Organization (WHO), there’s an estimated 485,000 diarrhoeal deaths each year due to contaminated drinking water. The WHO also stated that at least 2 billion people have a source that’s contaminated with faeces. 

That’s over 25% of the global population! There can be a lot of harmful contaminants present in water and this depends on your location. These contaminants can cause irreversible bodily damage after a long time of regularly being ingested.

It’s good to use water filters to ensure what goes into your system is clean and safe. Water filters remove contaminants in the water, but not trace minerals. Hard water is not a health hazard but it does have its downsides. To amend hard water, you can use a water softener.

Suppose you’re on city water and struggling with water hardness from having too much calcium present. In that case, a whole house filtration system will remove water impurities and other contaminants, but water softeners are best for removing calcium.

Using a filter membrane system only works with reverse osmosis systems, so to achieve calcium reduction you don’t want a calcium filter, but rather to emply water softeners to remove excess calcium from the whole house.