Review: ZeroWater 8 cup pitcher

When we moved into our last house, there was a reverse osmosis system that we used for awhile until I replaced it with one that I could get filters from Home Depot instead of having to goto a speciality store. The water tasted pretty good, or at least we didn’t notice the taste. When we moved into our rental, we quickly realized how bad tap water tastes. Within the first week, we went to pick out a filtering pitcher.

My wife said she didn’t like the taste of the Brita filters, so we looked for an alternative. Wal-Mart had a few choices and we settled on the ZeroWater 8-Cup Pitcher. The marketing gimmick that sold us is that it included a test meter to show us the total dissolved solids (TDS) of the water as the pitcher was supposed to bring the tap water down to 0 parts of million of stuff in the water.

When we got home, we used the meter to test and it read 323. We poured in tap water, let it filter and then after a few minutes, we had a pitcher full of filtered water. We tested it and low and behold, it read 0 ppm. The water tasted pretty good and we started a system of filling up the pitcher and transferring it into another pitcher that we put in the refrigerator. (My wife likes room temperature water, I like cold water.)

Things went well for about a week and then I went to test the output of the filter and it read 60. The instructions said the replace the filter after the water reached 6. Hmmm, if 1 filter lasted about a week and the filters cost about $15 each, it would cost me about $60 per month for filtered water. I drink a lot of water and due to the poor quality of our water, the filters just weren’t going to last.

So what were my options? Buy filters? Get bottled water? Drink tap water? I decided to try the second option and for about $30 per month, we’re getting bottled water delivered. Based on our water consumption, this will be about half the cost of the filters and a whole lot less work.

Pros

• Included test meter is cool.
• Water tastes pretty good.
• Pitcher fits in refrigerator.

Cons

• Filter cost is too high.

Summary

While I liked the concept of the filtering pitcher and the water tasted pretty good, the filter cost is far too high. If you live in an area that has better tap water to begin with, the filters might last longer. I really wanted to like this, and now I feel kind of weird about having water delivered (I kind of always thought that people that had bottle water delivered were wasting money).

If you have bad tasting water, I cannot recommend this product and possibly more generally, any filtering pitcher, due to cost if you consume a large amount of water. I drink 48-64 ounces of water or more a day consistently, so I’m pretty picky about the water.