So, I’m a bit of a drinking water freak. Actually, I’m probably just a water freak. When I say freak I mean it in a good way. Clean water is important to me. The more I learn about nutrition and health the more I know I have been right all these years about wanting to make sure the water my family and I drink is clean. I’ve never been able to tolerate hotel water or city water that has noticeable chlorine. I can’t even drink out of plastic cups or bottles that have any kind of smell – surely something is leaching into the water, yuck. Don’t even get me started on fluoride, sigh.
When we moved to California I knew we were moving to an agricultural area. One side of our town has hundreds, probably thousands of acres of walnut and almond orchards. I told my husband and our realtor that I did not want to look at houses on the west side of town. I wanted to be as far away from the orchards (and any weird runoff) as possible. Fast forward a year and guess what, we live directly across the street from miles and miles of orchards. When the perfect house/neighborhood presents itself it’s hard to say no. Anyway, we have a well. I have had the water tested several times. So far so good but that doesn’t stop me from worrying. Maybe today all the tests say everything is fine but who knows if/when the recommended levels of contaminates might change resulting in our “just fine” levels being NOT fine. Even without detectable levels of dangerous nasty stuff, the water is still really hard, lots of minerals. Now, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing but it’s something. I didn’t want a reverse osmosis system because that takes everything out of the water. Some people even refer to that water as “dead” water. One extreme to the other. The house has a cartridge filtration system and we added an under sink filtration system in the kitchen. My husband was open to any ideas I had about purifying the water. It’s been a year and a half and I haven’t done anything, until now.
I have been looking at Berkey Water Filtration Systems for a long time, before we even moved to California. I finally decided it was time. A colleague of mine is a distributor so that made it easy. I contacted my friend Debbie and ordered a system from her. It came today. I have just finished putting it together and filtering water. It’s a stand alone system. It doesn’t hook up to your plumbing system. You can actually take it camping or traveling if you are so inclined. One of the reason it took so long to finally get this was because we had to figure out where we would put it. We don’t like putting things on the counter so we needed to find a spot that would work. We actually bought a fairly large one. They range in size and price. I decided I was going to want to use the water for drinking and cooking. We ended up getting the Berkey Imperial with two black filters. If you’d like to check out the Berkey systems you can link to my colleague Debbie’s page here. Here’s a link to a page with filtration specifications.
I tried to get a couple of good pictures of my Berkey but the lighting was bad. It looks just like the one above except I got what’s called a Berkey sight glass spigot so we can see the water level.
Do any of you have a Berkey system? If so do you like it?
Eat Well, Feel Good, Have Fun
I’m Amy a board certified holistic nutritionist, certified functional nutritionist and lifestyle practitioner and certified Life Coach. I help women in midlife understand the changing needs of their body so that they can stop dieting and lose weight permanently. At 56 I live what I teach. Don’t believe the story that your best years are behind you. They are not. Your best years are just starting!