Yesterday I had a very bad experience with the Zerowater water filter that people should know about BEFORE they waste their money on one. I wish I had read a review!
My significant other(s.o.) bought a Zerowater pitcher and we've been using it to make our coffee for more than a month. The coffee started tasting bad, so for the first time I drank Zerowater by itself: God, was it awful!!! It even made my mouth feel irritated and this irritation lasted for for several hours.
I had my s.o. try some and she had the same result: horrible taste, irritated her mouth. She was going to pour the Zerowater down the drain, but I stopped her and said we should keep it in case we get sick and need to get it tested for bacteria or whatever.
We both agreed the predominatnt taste (besides VERY bad) was acidic. Now I'm a guy who dumps obscene amounts of vinigar on my fried fish and love its taste - and it never irritates my mouth.
I have a modest background in chemistry and wanted to figure out what made the Zerowater so bad. All I have on hand is my swimming pool testing kit which includes a Ph (acid or base, base = alkaline) test in a very narrow range. The Zerowater tested acidic - beyond what this test can quantify. But how acid was it? I took the Zerowater and added alkaline water to it to try to gauge some measure of how acid it. Four times the original volume of Zerowater did not neutralize the Zerowater's acidity, so I added 10 times the volume and still it was acid. At 24 times the volume it was STILL acid. That was the point where my container ran out of calibrated markings, but I keep adding alkaline water to well more than 40 times the original Zerowater volume before it would finally change to neutral.
We both got on the Internet and read the Zerowater reviews - if we had done this before we bought the Zerowater pitcher, we never would have wasted our money. One review mentioned talking to several water purification experts who said that untreated water can not be made free of total dissolved solids (the TDS that the Zerowater tester measures) without using an acid process. AHA! - thought I!!! Many reviews by people who had been using Zerowater over time said the same things about the same bad taste that we experienced and pegged it to the filter needing to be replaced. We had already replaced it once. The consensus seemed to be that the Zerowater filter had to be replaced way too often and at very high cost. We decided that we were going to throw away the Zerowater pitcher because we never wanted to taste water this bad tasting ever again. However, we still had a spare filter, so we throughly cleaned the pitcher and we replaced the filter yet again.
For the hell of it, I repeated the pool Ph test and found that even though our tap water tests shows an alkaline (opposite of acidic) result, the new Zerowater was also acid and beyond what the test's range could measure. Let me stress that this range is VERY limited and that even vinigar would test acid well beyond its range. But this time when I added the alkaline water it only took 2 or 3 drops (a small fraction of the volume of the Zerowater in the test)to make it neutral. So that was reassuring enough that I braved drinking the new Zerowater: it now had no bad taste, but it tasted no better than the tap water, which itself has no bad taste. (Note: Oklahoma City has very good public drinking water and some years back the city entered its water into a national contest and our water came out 5th best in the nation. Some place in Alaska took 1st place).
We have still decided to throw away the Zerowater pitcher. I don't like what happened, don't want any chance of tasting water that bad ever again, don't want Zerowater in my body. And we certainly are not going to spend so much money to replace the Zerowater filters so often. The only reason we use a filter on the coffee water is so that the expensive pod coffee maker doesn't get damaged by minerals in the tap water. Who knows?, water made that acid by a used filer may have done more damage to the coffee maker than tap water ever would.
I feel totally ripped off that so much money was wasted on the Zerowater pitcher and replacement filters. We will change to a different brand of water filter - but this time we are going to research what we are buying.
BTW: know what else I found when I researched Zerowater on the Internet: they had been sued by the bottled water association in Federal Court and Zerowater settled out of court!!! Here is a bit of the article:
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http://www.foodbev.com/news/zerowater-agrees-to-settle-false-ad-lawsuit-brought-by-ibwa
ZeroWater agrees to settle false ad lawsuit brought by IBWA
Filed by Shaun Weston
The International Bottled Water Association (IBWA) and Zero Technologies (ZeroWater) have settled a lawsuit IBWA brought against ZeroWater.
The lawsuit, which was filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, alleged that ZeroWater made false and misleading statements in its advertisements regarding the health, safety and taste of bottled water products, as well as the capabilities of ZeroWater's products.
The parties have resolved the lawsuit. As part of a confidential settlement between the parties, ZeroWater agreed to certain restrictions on its advertising. Specifically, ZeroWater has agreed to a consent order, enforceable by the federal court, that requires ZeroWater to not make certain statements relating to its products and to bottled water products that it had previously made in its advertisements. In addition, Zero Water has agreed not to make certain other statements relating to the health, safety or taste of bottled water, either explicitly or by implication...
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