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Water pressure/flow with whole house filter

last year

I am planning to install a 3-stage whole house filter due to issues with our city water. I am concerned about water pressure and flow rates due to my large family. Any suggestions on 3 stage water filters that don’t affect the water pressure or provide adequate flow rates for a large family. Do you have to limit bathing/showering when washing dishes or clothes?

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Comments (5)

jrb451
last year
Don't the three stage filters you're looking at address this in their specifications?
kaseki
last year
Measuring the existing pressure would be a good start. If it is above 60 psi, then you should be able to filter to whatever your max flow needs are so long as the filter pressure drop is less than the difference between actual and 60. If you use a downstream pressure regulator set to 60 psi, you won't notice the filter.

If municipal pressure is less than or equal to 60 psi, then you may want to evaluate what degree of drop you can tolerate.

Note that my use of 60 psi is just a value that I recall seeing listed for certain devices' pressure "expectations."
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Well, you can save a lot of money if you send back the sharkbite and get CPVC fittings. Seriously. Just an FYI: You can do some of the water softener stuff somewhat inexpensively on Amazon. There are also neutralizing units for about the same amount of money. Not saying that specific unit - just an example - but I bought one and have been very happy with it. Again, I don't know your hardness and iron levels, etc. but just be open to the idea that you could get a good softener a lot cheaper than you might think. One way to think about it is to extend the pipes over that wall for a "water softener loop". You can put the basic filter in that loop for now, and then replace that filter with the rest of it as you have money. If you are working in CPVC or PEX, it's inexpensive to run the pipes - CPVC (including CPVC fittings) would be the easiest and cheapest because it doesn't need any investment in tools other than a hacksaw. If you install the softener loop, do it with a 3 valve bypass (use brass ball valves, not CPVC). This allows you to shut off water to a filter/softener and bypass it - so you have water. The example of that in my photo is is in the lower left corner of the board. There are 3 red ball valves in an "H" configuration that would allow me to take the water softener off line without shutting off the water to the house.
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littlekf
Original Author
last year
Some of the filters we are looking at will say “up to 15 GPM”. I’m looking for specific experiences families have had with their filters and whether they have worked well for in regards to flow rate/pressure.
kaseki
last year
As you might have guessed, "up to 15 GPM" is meaningless without other data.

You probably need to look into industrial filter suppliers for technical data. I can report that my municipality typically supplies water at well above 60 psi, I use a pressure regulator to get it down (originally for my Miele Optima to try to discover if pressure was the reason its incompetently designed intake solenoids die, but other appliances may prefer lower pressure for solenoid reliability).

My filter is mounted before my pressure regulator, and is a dual height 1 micrometer particle filter. I try to change it every 6 months. It seems adequate to not drag down the pressure, but I haven't tested its flow vs. pressure drop. At this writing at zero flow, pre-regulator pressure is 82 psi, post is 62 psi.

What this means in my case is that the filter can lose 10 psi or so at whatever my maximum flow rate is likely to be. For you, the maximum flow would depend upon whether your filter is truly whole-house, or the external hose spigots are connected ahead of the filter and your maximum flow rate is just from a washing machine plus showers, for example.
Jake The Wonderdog
last year
last modified: last year
I would be shocked to see any typical 3 stage filter that could actually filter water at anything like an acceptable rate for a whole house filter.

My 4x20" carbon/kdf filter has a service flow rate of 3 gpm with a capacity of 95,000 gal for chlorine removal. It's great for filtering the drinking water. It's hard for me to imagine a 4x20 filter that has a service flow rate of 15 gpm - let alone be one of 3 cartridges.

Get an actual backwashing carbon filter in a tank if you are going to do whole house filtering. That said, most of the time you only need to filter the drinking water.

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