Monday Mission: The Water that Gets You Clean

Your mission, if you choose to accept, is to get the chlorine out of your bath and shower.

If you have city water, it’s almost certainly treated with either chlorine (aka bleach) or chloramine for sanitizing purposes. Since I don’t like using bleach as a cleaner in my home, consuming it in drinking water isn’t high on my list.

Someday soon we’ll have to talk about filtering your drinking water when I finally get my filter, but for now, let’s talk skin.

images from Radiant Life; this post is sponsored by Radiant Life

As your largest organ, one of the skin’s jobs is to absorb. That means that anything that goes on your skin, as I discuss in this natural personal products master list, also goes into your body. It’s like eating your lotion, soap, shampoo…and even the water you bathe in. Check this out from the Radiant Life website:

Yuck.

We’ve had a chlorine-filtering attachment on our shower for about two years now. They’re not super expensive (mid-range, I’d say) and are very easy to install and upkeep. I have a reminder in my Google calendar to flip it over every few months to extend the life of the filter and then to install a new filter once a year.

When I take a shower elsewhere, I can often really smell the “chlorine pool” smell in the hot steam now that I don’t have it at my house.

What to Look for in a Shower Filter

First, check your city water report to see if your municipality uses chlorine or chloramine. The latter is MUCH harder to filter out (see below). If you’ve got chlorine, start researching shower filters. Look for:

1. Easy to install
2. Easy to re-order filters
3. Run price analysis, but read the small print – how long will the filter last and how much do replacement filters cost?
4. Will it work with your showerhead?

I don’t know that I can recommend a certain brand, as I’ve only tried one (and it’s packed up in a 10×20′ storage unit right now, so I don’t even know what it is). I will say that the one downfall of my filter, which may be true for all of them, I’m not sure, is this: it takes 10-20 seconds for the water temperature to adjust when running through the filter. Annoying.

Radiant Life, a KS sponsor, sells two filters for you to start your search with:

• Rainshow’r Filter (pictured above) – lasts about a year, filters cost half as much as the unit itself, easy to order through Radiant Life
• New Century Shower filter – lasts about 18 mos., a few bucks more expensive than the rainshow’r, but I don’t know where to find replacement filters UPDATE: Ah, I get it now. The housing is sealed, so the whole thing gets replaced every 18 mos., no filter replacements involved.

Do you currently use a shower filter? Do you have a favorite brand or source?

What About Baths?

Immersing my kids in chlorinated water isn’t my favorite thing to do, even though we swim in it in the summer. (Interesting conversation about chlorinated pools and alternative options here.)

We simply use the shower with its hose to fill the bathtub, but I admit it takes about five times as long to get a bath ready. Typically the kids are still undressing and whatnot, but every so often it’s pretty annoying to wait.

An option for baths that sounds a lot less complicated is a Crystal Ball Bath Dechlorinator (pictured above). You simply run the bath water through the ball then swish it around a little in the bath afterwards. For me, another bonus of that system is portability. You could bring it along to grandma’s house for a week’s vacation…or 3 month stay.

Since my kids have sort of sensitive skin, it makes me feel good to keep extra chemicals off their bodies, hoping to stave off eczema and dryness. Of course, when winter comes, the eczema did start flaring up again…

Do you use a bath filter? Have you noticed any benefits?

It Gets Trickier…Chloramine

I’ll be checking out my new city water when we move into our new house and crossing my fingers that they use chlorine, not chloramine. The only way to filter out chloramine that I can tell is an uber-expensive whole house filter – yikes! Perhaps technology is changing – a quick Google search for “chloramine shower filter” did yield some results. The filters are larger and have two sides, compared to the one I have and pictured here. Hmmm…anyone have experience with these?

The advantage – you don’t have to purchase and maintain separate filters for each individual bath or shower in your home.

The disadvantage – definitely not portable, and expensive. Still needs further filtering for truly high quality drinking water.

Radiant Life does offer the whole house filters, so if you’re interested in looking into those systems, I’m happy to introduce you to Norm and Kathy over there, and they can help you find the best choice for your needs.

Well Water

If you’ve got well water, you shouldn’t need a special chlorine filter. You get a “bye” this week for the Monday Mission. Check out the full list and see if there’s one you missed that you could tackle this week, or focus on water anyway: store some water for an emergency without using chemicals OR get your water tested to make sure there’s nothing nasty sneaking into your house through the pipes.

RELATED: GRAYL Water Filter Bottle Review

Need More Baby Steps?

Here at Kitchen Stewardship, we’ve always been all about the baby steps. But if you’re just starting your real food and natural living journey, sifting through all that we’ve shared here over the years can be totally overwhelming.

That’s why we took the best 10 rookie “Monday Missions” that used to post once a week and got them all spruced up to send to your inbox – once a week on Mondays, so you can learn to be a kitchen steward one baby step at a time, in a doable sequence.

Yes! One Change a Week please!

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