I recently added two different water filter units to my home and to my pond. To my surprise... I'm getting a number of PMs asking questions. So maybe its time to have a thread on water filters. I will also say there are several people here on Koiphen who have water filters, so hopefully they will add comments and pictures.
I live in the city of LA and my city water is absolutely loaded with chlorine and chlorimide. As things go the city is making my water worse and worse. Bonding ammonia with chlorine is not good for people, plants, or fish... but that is what is cheaper for the city so this is what they are doing.
I shopped around and found a local company that makes industrial, light industrial, and residential grade water quality equipment. This company, AMPAC USA, is not the only company who makes this kind of equipment, but I would recommend them.
The first picture is my GAC (granulated active carbon) filter, it's the blue canister on the right. Just to it's left is a new water softener that is for the house only. The input and output pipes of this equipment is 1" copper, very little water pressure drop. The GAC is 2.0cf (cubic feet) of GAC material and I opted for th electronic head.
The second picture is the outside corner of my house where I opened up my water main. It looks a bit funny at first but remember this is a retrofit and I didn't want a huge drywall or stucco repair job either. So I had the plummer drill two 1" holes and one 3/4" hole all the way through the wall. You can see how it used to be connected. I diverted the main to go through the wall to the input on the GAC. The output of the GAC is Tee'd to both the 3/4" line (sprinklers and pond) and to the water softener input. The water softener output goes back out the wall and reconnects to the old plumbing for the house.
The third and forth pictures show some of the fancy plumbing behind the GAC and water softener units.
A side note for saftey: The two 1" lines do touch outside the house and are soldered together so that the ground wires on the old plumbing do electrically connect to the copper than goes into the earth. You don't really want to float the earth ground for your house.
One thing to know is that the granular nature of the active carbon will allow some trace amounts of chlorine to pass through... but it is at trace levels.
Next I'll post my on my 3 canister CB (carbon block) unit. This unit is in series with my GAC, so my pond water is twice filtered.
Brad