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Archive for the ‘Contributed Articles’ Category

What are Electronic Home Water Conditioners?

Have problems with hard water? Scaling on the inside of your pipes and hot water heater? Are your hot water heating costs going up? Hard water is caused by having a lot of calcium or magnesium dissolved in it. The usual solution is a water softner. They work by exchanging the calcium and magnesium ions in the water with sodium ions. Since sodium  does not precipitate out to the pipes the scaling problem is eliminated. Unfortunately in the process an enormous about of  salty water is created and dumped down a drain. Some municipalities are banning their use because of the strain on their water purification systems.
Electronic water conditioners work by inducing magnetic and electrical fields in the water and forces the free dissolved minerals like calcium and magnesium to crystallized before the mineral ions settle at the walls of the pipes or heating elements. It doesn’t “remove” the minerals but changes their state and prevents them from attaching to the pipes. This is done for pennies a day and require no maintenance. No salt, no drain, no strain on our water treatment plants. Plus the healthy minerals like calcium and magnesium aren’t replaced by sodium, which we all know we use too much of already. If you are using the new tank less water heaters these are a “must”. Find out more from the water quality experts at Better Water Store.

Aquasana Whole House Filtration-A Great Solution for Your Colored Clothes

Have you noticed that your dark clothes start looked a little bit faded after a few rounds in the laundry? We did. Especially my husbands dark golf shirts. Our solution? A Aquasana whole house filtration system.  You see, if you test your water supply, you might be a little surprised at the amount of chlorine that is in your water supply. We were.  We purchased a water test kit from Better Water Store, and tested it right in our home without having to send it to a lab. Among other contaminants was an extremely high level of chlorine.  In fact there was more in our water supply that was is recommend for a pool. Imagine washing your clothes in a pool and expecting them to stay color fast.

The Aquasana EQ-300 was a easy choice. Highly recommend from some of our friend that have them, the cost was reasonable (less than $800 dollars), and doesn’t need replacing but once every three years.  After a couple of hours, our plumber had everything up to speed and we were good to go. Great showers, laundry and no more spots on our dishes.

Taking a Shower With Our New Rainshow’r Shower Filter

I’ve always thought having a water filter for our home was important. I mean who doesn’t want clean water for our family to drink. Reading the news about the amount of contaminants found in our water took care of the initiative to add a water filter to our home. What hadn’t hit home was the importance of having a shower filter.

Stop to think about it. Our bodies are heated when we take a shower and our pores open up. Then the water is heated also with the shower head creating smaller droplets of water. Where is the chlorine that is used as a disinfectant  to go. That’s right its absorbed through our skin into our bodies. They estimate that you take in 10 times the amount of chlorine a day by showering versus drinking. Wow. That got us thinking! There are several great quality shower filters out there. We choose the Rainshow’r New Century from Better Water Store. They offered free shipping and fast delivery. Installation was a snap, all we needed were a pair of pliers and a few minutes. Now we have filtered drinking water and shower water!

USB 3.0 Just Might Change the World

Why exactly should we be so excited for the next installation of USB? Well frankly, its just fantastic, but in technical terms it brings a whole new level of speed to information transfers.  Combined with solid state drives USB 3.0 promises to revolutionize the way back up, send, receive and augment data.  With speeds reaching more than 20 gigabytes a second compared to USB 2.0′s 1 gigabyte.  So what does this mean for the average user?  Well along with less time spent watching files transfer, you also have an increased power flow running throw it, 900mA compared to USB 2.0′s 500mA per hub.  Individual mA sees an increase in 50 mA, simply put, your ipod is going to charge a lot faster than it did before.  The possibilities that come with increased data transfer rates are endless, from downloading movies in seconds to backing up your data almost instantly.  Users will see a definite improvement in everyday computing.  With increased file sizes for HD movies and songs USB 3.0 could not have come soon enough.

Aquasana Undercounter Water Filters-Best Value!

Aquasana undercounter water filters are a great buy! We keep reading about the terrible quality of our water.  There was an article about the quality of water that is supplied to our schools today. The basic  gist of the article is how contaminated our water supply is and how the municipal water supplies aren’t supplying safe water for our children. Articles like this one are published almost daily. Why take a chance?  The solution is fairly simple and isn’t that all expensive.

The savings of using a filter like this is significant. After the initial purchase the on going expenses of replacing the filters, gives us quality at less than 10 cents a gallon.  That is a huge difference than buying bottled water or having water delivered to your home.  Plus the quality of the water is better.  We purchased the Aquasana model AQ-4501 from Better Water Store. The discounted price included free shipping and was at our home in just a few days. Connection was easy and we were drinking quality water within a few minutes.

Why Should You Drink Ionized Water?

One of the important effects of ionized water is its antioxidant properties. This water will just easily penetrate into the skin making it more available and exert its effect more efficiently in the body.

Ionized water is important in homeostasis, the over all pH balance of the body’s fluids. When our diet becomes more acidic, the ionized water will neutralize making it safe for the body’s consumption. Having an unbalanced acidity in our body’s fluid is not good because it may develop a serious disease, such as cancer. And even at a very young age, excessive acidity may be produced depending on the kind of food we eat.

Aside from its detoxifying effect, the ionized water is a more dehydrating substance compared to tap water. We like the Jupiter water ionizer. It will also give a beneficial effect to athletes by providing higher blood oxygen level that would result to increased stamina and endurance. Most athletes’ lacks oxygen in their blood level due to inadequate intake of nutritious food but ionized water helps supply enough amount of oxygen in the blood.

We Love Our Countertop Water Filter

Clean water is not very hard to come by these days.  Especially in a wonderful country like the United States where clean water is part of our basic infrastructure.  With such a large population, it is important for water filtration and purification to be cost effective and efficient.  This leads to the wide spread use of chlorine to purify and kill bacteria in water.  This chlorine stays in the water all the way till you drink it.  Chlorine is bad, remember?  Don’t drink the water in the swimming pool is something your mother always taught you.

Why would you want to drink the water from the tap if it has close to the same levels of chlorine as a pool?  Lucky there is a cost efficient system to filter out almost all of the chlorine in your drinking water, a countertop water filter is the answer.  It costs less per gallon than any type of bottled water and is more environmentally friendly.

We use our counter top water filter for everything, filling up water bottles, cooking, feeding it to our animals.  It is important to have a point of use water filter to reduce the amount of chlorine that your body absorbs everyday.

Organic Foods-New Report Says Not More Nutritious Than Conventionally Grown

A new study by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, is causing a stir by taking a position that conventionally grown food is not any more nutritious that  organically grown food.”

Published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Critics have quickly jumped on the reports conclusion however.

Chief scientist for The Organic Center, Charles Benbrook,PhD  says they have produced different conclusions, which support organic over conventional.

Dr. Benbrook also says that polyphenols and antioxidants are about 25% higher in organically grown foods. lack of focus on polyphenols and antioxidants.

I think on of the things that is most overlooked in this study is the amount of pesticides that aren’t used when grow organically. That alone will cause me to pick the organic over conventional any day.

Better Care at Home

Caring for the chronically ill has definately gotten easier over the last few years.  Now you can find a whole host of home care medical products that were just not available a decade ago.  And if there were, they were horribly expensive.

Now aside from more common needs like walkers, blood sugar monitors and portable oxygen tanks more sophisticated items like hospital beds and IV drip devices are available.  Common wheel chairs are often replaced by motorized scooters.  These new options makes life much better for both the in-home patient and their care givers.