Why Drinking Water Systems Need Annual Service Visits

When you buy a car, do you expect it to last forever even if you don’t perform any maintenance? Of course not! Every piece of machinery needs to have some work done every once in a while to keep it running smoothly, and the same goes for your drinking water system. That’s why you should schedule an annual service visit from an Angel Water representative. We’ll change your water filters, make sure everything is working properly, and test for changes in your water quality. Keep your system in order, and your water clean!

If you feel like you’re generally pretty healthy, do you still try to go to your doctor for an annual checkup? The wise answer is, of course, “yes.” Even if you think you feel healthy, you can’t quite be sure on your own—there could be some underlying problem you haven’t been able to detect, and it’s up to a trained professional to carry out a complete series of checks and tests to make sure everything is in working order and catch potential issues before they develop into serious problems even you can see.

It’s no different with drinking water systems. Just as you want a licensed professional to check your bodily systems every year, you also should have an expert periodically come look at your water purification systems, run tests to see if the water you’re drinking is still safe, and perform any maintenance work you may need done to prevent something going wrong.

This is why annual service visits are so important. Here are the main reasons you should be scheduling annual service for your drinking water systems.

Checking, Cleaning, and Changing Your Filter

The first reason to get a professional to come around for an annual service visit is to have them check and possibly clean or change the filter in your filtration system.

Many filters, including good ones, need to be changed every year according to the manufacturer’s specifications. This includes both the carbon filters found in most drinking water systems, and those in more complex reverse osmosis setups to be found in many modern whole-house systems. The pre- and post-filters in reverse osmosis systems need to be changed every 6-12 months just like other carbon filters, while reverse osmosis membranes generally need to be changed every couple of years.

Having a professional come in and change the filter for you removes a lot of the hassle of doing it yourself. Depending on your system, the process could require planning and a bit of dirty work as you shut off and drain the water and clean out the old filter housing, even with something as simple as an under-sink filtration system.

It also makes for one less filter change that you have to remember to perform. Changing your water filter isn’t something you typically think about, and if you haven’t experienced a notable change in the taste, smell, or color of your water, you may otherwise forget to do it. This way, you’ll at least have a minimum of one filter change per year, and will have your reverse osmosis membrane or other media changed when needed.

Sometimes your filter doesn’t necessarily need to be changed. Sometimes it just needs to be cleaned. Performing this maintenance task removes sediment, mold, and algae that can clog up your filter, so you can prolong its usefulness. This task however can be as dirty as it sounds, and so having a professional determine if your filter needs cleaning and perform the task for you can save you time and effort.

Making Sure that Drinking Water Systems Still Work

Drinking water systems are more than just their filter media though.

The process of taking the water piped into your home, running it through different stages of filtration, possibly storing the filtered water, flushing the filtered sediment, delivering the clean water to your various fixtures and appliances—this all requires many pieces of equipment, and so there are a lot of different sorts of things that go wrong.

This is why when we come out for our annual service visits, we run drinking water systems through an extensive 28-point diagnostics check.

These tests verify that every part of the drinking water systems is running the way it should—the filter isn’t clogged, the filtered material isn’t being released back into the water after filtration, the softener is working if you have one, there’s proper water pressure, etc.

You may be thinking though that if drinking water systems had something wrong with them, the homeowner would notice—but that’s not necessarily true.

Many of the toxins that can contaminate your water are undetectable. Lead, mercury, chromium-6, and many more such contaminants have no taste, color, or smell. That’s part of what makes them so dangerous. If your system has stopped working, and is no longer filtering these substances out, your body could itself be acting as a filter, picking out and storing these materials within you, where they build up and cause long-term damage.

So if you want to be sure that you have a working filter, rather than being a filter yourself, you want to be sure that the drinking water systems where you get your water have been regularly and thoroughly inspected to ensure they’re actually still working, despite what appearances might tell you.

Testing For Changes in Water Quality

Another important part of the annual service visit is testing your water.

Many drinking water systems filter out certain contaminants but not others. Some carbon filters only remove chlorine, lead, mercury, asbestos, and volatile organic compounds (VOCs), but can’t remove chromium, nitrates, perchlorate, arsenic, or fluoride. UV and ozone systems on the other hand can remove microorganisms such as disease-carrying bacteria, but not chemicals.

When choosing drinking water systems for your home, one of the important considerations is what’s in your water. If there’s no lead in your water, you don’t need to filter for lead, and so on and so forth.

So what if your water quality changes?

Water comes from natural sources, and nature is always changing. Whereas when drinking water systems were first installed they might have been effective for removing the contaminants found in that water, new contaminants can appear in the water supply which that particular system may not be equipped to handle.

If, for example, there is new farming or industrial development in areas near you and your water supply, then volatile organic compounds, mercury, and other contaminants can be introduced into the water through runoff or other pollution.

Again, these changes can go totally unnoticed with no change in the look, smell, or taste of your water.

So if you want to make totally sure that the water you’re drinking is safe and stays that way, schedule annual service visits with an experienced technician. Angel Water Inc. is the premier water quality company that has been installing, inspecting, and servicing drinking water systems in Barrington, IL and the surrounding Chicago area for years.

Simply give us a call at (847) 382-7800 and schedule an inspection visit. Protect your access to clean, safe water, and you’ll even have less to worry about during that annual checkup with your doctor, too.