Drinking water
Water worth walking to the kitchen for
A softener looks after the water your house uses. A drinking water station looks after the water your family actually drinks, out of the same tap you already walk to twenty times a day.
The case for going back to the tap
Almost every house we visit has a case of bottled water in it somewhere. In the garage, under the basement stairs, still in the trunk. Somebody buys it, somebody carries it in, somebody deals with the empties.
A Kinetico K5 Drinking Water Station puts an end to that errand. It goes in under the kitchen sink and feeds a small dedicated faucet beside your regular one. You pull the handle and it is there: cold, all day, for cooking, for coffee, for the water bottle heading to practice and the bowl by the back door.
The difference shows up fastest in the things you taste on their own. Ice that does not cloud a drink. Tea that tastes like tea instead of like the kettle. Pasta water and rice water, which is most of what ends up in the food on the table.
What the K5 is
The K5 treats water by reverse osmosis. In plain terms, house pressure pushes water through a membrane fine enough to leave a great deal of what was dissolved in it behind, and what comes through is held in a storage tank so you are never standing at the sink waiting on it.
It is the counterpart to the softener rather than a replacement for it. One looks after the whole house, from the water heater to the washing machine. The other looks after the glass in your hand.
The cartridges change by hand, with no tools and without calling anybody, although we are glad to do it for you on the annual visit. Which cartridges go in depends on what your water turns out to contain, which is one more reason we test before we recommend.
Where it shows up in a day
The same ordinary Tuesday from our home page, told from the kitchen sink.
The first pot of coffee
Water is 98 percent of a cup of coffee. Filtered water gets out of the way and lets the beans do the job you paid them to do.
Lunch at home
A glass poured from the little faucet, no bottle to open, nothing to put out with the recycling on Thursday.
Backpacks on the floor
When water tastes good, children drink it without being asked twice. Nobody negotiates and nobody reaches for the juice box.
Dinner
Rinsed produce, the pot of pasta water, the ice in every glass at the table. Water is the quiet ingredient in most of a meal.
One last cup
Tea at the end of the day, from the same small faucet that started the morning.
The two questions we always get
Do I still need a softener if I have a K5?
Usually yes, because the two are solving different problems. The K5 treats the few gallons a day your family drinks and cooks with. The softener treats the several hundred gallons that go through the water heater, the shower, the dishwasher and the laundry. Neither one covers for the other.
Will the water taste flat?
Some people notice it and some people never do. Kinetico builds a mineral cartridge for exactly that reason, and we can put one in if you would rather have a little mineral character in the glass. We would sooner set it up the way you like it than tell you how you ought to like it.
Taste it in your own kitchen first
The free in-home test takes about twenty minutes and it tells us which cartridges your water calls for. Bring us your worst glass of iced tea and we will talk about why it tastes that way.
Or call (614) 555-0100 and talk it through with somebody first.