The Importance of Water Filtration in New York City Homes

Homes across Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan and Staten Island take a city supply. That makes the question here less about the source and more about the journey. The supply arrives disinfected and the interesting part is what happens after that.

The building is the variable. Water that leaves a main in good condition still has to travel through a service line, then through whatever pipework is inside the house, before it reaches a glass. On a block where some houses went up in the 1920s and others in the 1970s, that journey is not the same journey, and neither is the water at the end of it.

Chlorine is the everyday complaint. A disinfectant residual is there for a good reason, and it also carries a taste and a smell that people notice most in drinking water, in coffee and in a long hot shower. Carbon filtration is the ordinary answer, at the sink or at the main line depending on how much of the house you want covered.

Older plumbing is where whole-home treatment earns its keep. Point-of-entry treatment protects everything downstream of it: the pipes, the fixtures, the water heater and the appliances, which in an older home are the expensive things to replace.

Apartments and houses need different answers. In a Manhattan co-op the answer is usually a drinking water system under the kitchen sink. In a Brooklyn row house, a Queens semi-detached home or a house on Staten Island with its own basement, a whole-home system at the main line covers every tap at once.

The straight answer is that nobody can tell you what your house needs without testing your water. That is where we start.