Carbon Only Filter

Different jobs. A softener uses resin and salt to remove calcium and magnesium — the minerals that cause scale, spotting and that film on your skin. A filter uses carbon or specialty media to remove chlorine, taste, odor and other contaminants. Softening doesn’t clean your water; filtering doesn’t soften it. Most Triangle city homes need filtering more than softening. Well homes often need both, plus more.

It comes down to how much water you use and what is in it. Our Single Tank puts softening resin and catalytic carbon together in one mixed bed, which suits most city homes with up to three bathrooms, and the Single Tank XL is the same build sized for four or more. A dual tank gives each media its own tank — a softener tank plus a catalytic carbon tank on city water, or on a well, a softener tank plus an iron and sulfur tank. Continuous demand and harder problems push you toward dual. We size it off your test and your household, not your square footage.

Legal and clean aren't the same standard. Municipal water in the Triangle meets every federal and state requirement, and the utilities do their job well. But the standards regulate a specific list of contaminants at specific levels — they don't cover taste, they don't cover chlorine byproducts, and they don't cover everything that's been found in Piedmont surface water over the last decade. Whether you need a system is a question about what's actually coming out of your tap and what bothers you. That's what the free test is for. If your water's fine, we'll tell you that.

Most whole-home systems are a half day. A reverse osmosis drinking system under the sink is usually two to three hours. If you need both, plan on one full day.