Have you ever noticed that everywhere you turn these days there is something on the news or written in the daily newspaper reporting on just how bad our drinking water is? Some of what you read is quite frighting and you start to wonder if our Government water authorities really give a damm!

It seems no matter where you go the subject of our drinking water is a topic of conversation. Once if anyone complained about the quality of their drinking water you were branded "too soft" but people are really starting to notice the difference of the water taste from years gone by till now. We now have access to obtaining so much more information these days and people are questioning Government authorities and asking questions like "how safe is our drinking water?'

In the 1960's the Government decided to add fluoride to the water supply, seemed like a good idea back then but what about now?

Was it worthwhile?

Was it necessary?

Why do a lot of people go out of their way to buy toothpaste without fluoride added?

So many questions these days about what is in our drinking water. Other questions like "What effect does copper pipes have on our health?" and how much lead, arsenic and other chemicals are in our drinking water supply?"

Now not everyone is interested in having great drinking water for their family but I tend to think that perhaps you might have a concern or two if you have taken the time to come and browse our web site to check out water filtration.

I hope you enjoy reading our story because what I found was once you become aware of the importance of getting good quality drinking water the confusion sets in fast because there are just so many choices to be made and everything can start to get all so complicated but hey it shouldn't be like that and this is where we hope to make all the difference in assisting your family to get the right filtration system that suit your family needs.

Does this sound like a familiar story to you?

Well let me share my experience with you and my search for getting good quality drinking water for my family which spanned over 8 years. I guess my search for a good water filtration system was a bit like the "serch for the holly grail"!

We considered ourselves to be just your average family living in suburban Perth Western Australia, (Mullaloo area to be exact) and the water seemed fine for many many years, then as the years went by and Western Australia experienced rapid growth and drier winters etc the water supply started to change. We noticed a colour change, odour and the taste was different. My husband thought that this was a good idea to start drinking more beer!!! Not a good solution but he did give it some serious thought for a while!

We then found out that the water supply was a mixture of under-ground bore water from near by pine plantations and market gardens. Should I have been concerned back then? Probably but I thought that the Government Water Authority would always make sure we had the best quality drinking water available.

Now back in the 1970's and 80's I wasn't as switched on about the importance of having good drinking water but it always was still at the back of my mind that surely this water can't be all that good for my families health. At the time I chose to do nothing as I hoped that the situation would improve because Government's care about the health of their people…don't they? That's what I personally thought anyway. Well how naive can one be?

Anyway as the years went by it was in the early 1990's and due to work committiments we moved the family up to the Goldfields, Leonora to be exact. Some people might say where's that? Well it is about 234km north east of Kalgoorlie and mind you we all enjoyed living up there, met heaps of wonderful people and the kids really enjoyed the lifestyle and I do believe it is the land of opportunity in place like Leonora as it was very good to us all, anyway enough of my reminiscing.

We did notice that sometimes when you had a shower the water smelt like raw sewerage and left a white film over your body, we used to joke about playing noughts and crosses on your body that's how bad the water was at times.

Getting the soap or your shampoo to form a lather was a real treat, which didn't happen very often. Turned out a bit embarrassing once when we stayed at a Motel in Kalgoorlie and poured too much bubble bath into the spa and the soap suds started to overflow out under the door of the motel room.!!!! But when you went to Perth or even Kalgoorlie for that matter you were always covered in soap suds and you soon learnt that you didn't need to use as much shampoo or bubble bath as what you needed to in Leonora.

So back to our drinking water at Leonora all we thought you did was turn on a tap, fill up your glass and drink the water right! WRONG upon arriving in Leonora the first thing that most people said to us was,

"What ever you do don't drink the water unless you want Bali belly" or some would say make sure you put red cordial in the water and with 3 kids I didn't like the red cordial option!

Hmmm so if someone says to me not to try something most of us don't listen so we all drank the tap water. Well that was not a good idea we all felt so sick in the tummy so off to the supermarket and we started our long and expensive journey of buying bottle water and our search for the "holly grail" of good drink water had begun. We would go through about two 19 litre bottles a week and we lived up in Leonora for 7 years so you don't have to be Albert Einstein to work out that we spent a huge amount of money on buying bottled water.

Sometimes we were very lucky and got to have some rain water but that never lasted. So we then started to buy water filtration systems. We used to go through a kettle every few months as they would just burn out with the build up of calcium. The elements were so heavy in calcium and other minerals. Hot water systems also had a hard time surviving with the calcium build up as well. Oh! and those products that say they remove all rust, lime and calcium stains from kettles and bathrooms well we brought heaps of those but they never did what we expected. You never drank a full cup of tea or coffee because the bottom was always full of crunchie bits! It was awful when I think back!!

Our very first filter system was one of those little cheap ones from the supermarket that you fill it up with tap water and the filter will remove all in impurities so the label said from the water, yeah sure ….we threw that one away. Then we thought hang the expense lets buy this $100 water filter jug it was made by a respectable electrical company so it must be good. We read all the information on the package and yep it sounded like this is the right one for us. WRONG again it made hardly any difference so we threw that one away as well. We then proceeded to spent heaps of wasted money buying all these so called wonderful easy to use water filters you know the ones that you can buy from major department stores from $30 upwards but it didn't make much difference so we continued to buy bottled water.

I then started working at the local Pre-Primary as a teacher's aide and I noticed that the Pre-Primary had a Reverse Osmosis System and it was brilliant to say the least. It had a tank under the sink and a special attractive chrome looking tap on top of the sink where you got your water from. The taste was just how you would expect good drinking water should be. I couldn't believe how fantastic the water tasted. So I was all excited, came home and said to my husband Ken, I have found the solution to our drinking water problem and proceeded to tell him about this RO unit.

He too was please so my next plan was to track a company down where I could buy one of these RO Systems. I wanted the exact same filtration system that was installed at the Pre-Primary because I knew that worked and I didn't want to be sucked in yet again so the company gave me the price and I felt a huge ray of disappointment come over me as I asked him to repeat the price because he told me that particular unit comes from the USA and the cost is approximately $2,000.00 and the filters were $150 each which needed to be replaced each 6 - 12 months. It didn't take much to burst my bubble. Oh what a let down $2,000.00 for a water unit you must be kidding.

Well, that really bothered me because it was a lot of money and even though one should not blink an eyelid to the cost when you know that your families health is the most important thing but sadly we did and we kept on buying bottled water.

As I mentioned earlier Leonora is the land of great business opportunities so with a friend of mine we decided that what Leonora needed was a craft shop and coffee house where people can come and buy local hand made crafts and call in for a cappuccino. When you live in remote places things like cappuccino's, mail order catalogues and junk mail become an exciting thing because you just don't get a lot of things that you take for granted living in the city.

Anyway we worked in with the local Heritage Society and our coffee house was born. We called it Squizzies so that people could come in and have a squiz at things very Australian we thought! We used to make the best ever scones so if you want the recipe just email me for it.

Now because we where going to be using a cappuccino machine I decided that that it would be a good idea to have the local water tested because with a good cappuccino you need great tasting water. So off to Perth I went with a 1 litre water sample from the shop tap and I paid $70 to have it privately analysed for everything.

Have you ever heard people say to you in the past that sometimes things are best left alone well I must admit that thought did run though my mind when I read the report. The person doing the analysis had never seen such bad quality water, it had high levels of arsenic, plus heaps of other high level chemicals and minerals that were not good for ones health. It also came with a warning not to give this drinking water to small infant children as it didn't come up to the World Health Organization standards. My thoughts were we are all bathing in this water and some people where actually drinking it!

It was from that day on I took the quality of drinking water very seriously and although our family didn't buy a Reverse Osmosis system at that time my thoughts and views on water purifiers expanded.

So we started our little coffee shop up but we were lucky because the local mining company which uses Reverse Osmosis water in their camps gave us Reverse Osmosis water to use and our coffee shop was a great meeting place for the locals. We even served the Governor of Western Australia morning tea on his official visit to Leonora.

We ended up saying a sad farewell to Leonora as we felt our kids needed a better high school education so we brought a property near the coast in Geraldton Western Australia and moved there in January 1999 and our search for the "holly grail of great drinking water" should come to an end right? I can remember say "hey no more buying water as we are moving to Geraldton and this is a civilised town no more putting up with bore water and think of all the money we will be saving because we can drink water from a tap." We got rid of all our containers that stored those 19 litre bottles of water because we were moving into a real country town where the population was 20,000 plus people …..WRONG AGAIN BIG TIME. Back to buying bottled water once again. My Search for the "Holy Grail" of Good Quality Drinking Water continued!

This time we had enough of buying water all the time, the expense and inconvience was just getting out of hand. I was starting to get fed up with this unacceptable situation. Most locals would say I've been drinking this water all my life and I'm OK and it was clear that they were not a picture of good health.

I just found it hard to comprehend that the Government appeared to just not want to approach this problem. Probably much like that river in Egypt, you know the one "Denial"! (Just a little dry humour) Sometimes in life you have to get to a point where you are angry enough and really want to make the changes before any improvement will take place and that's where I was at.

Ken and I started to do more and more internet searching and came across a water distiller so we paid $400 and brought one. I must admit the quality of the water was far superior to the bottle water we were buying and the water from this type of process was also recommended by the Kidney Foundation. That was a great recommendation for us. The only problem we had was with our family we couldn't keep up with the demand of water each day. The machine was working non stop so we decided to do more research and find a Reverse Osmosis system that not only worked as good as the one we experienced up in the Leonora but is affordable and easy to install. So once again the search for the "holly grail" to find a system to produce good quality drinking water continues.

By this time Ken and I had started our own Internet mail order business called Go Direct Enterprise (GDE for short) and we wanted to sell products that we personally used and believed in especially Reverse Osmosis Systems and Water Distillers. Probably not a great way to enter into business but we are passionate about strong family ethics and honesty. We finally got onto an Australian company which are now our suppliers for some of the best Water Filtration systems on the market today.

We decided that if we are going to sell these Reverse Osmosis units we had better install one and put it through its paces. We ordered the 4 stage RO System because we have been through all the hassles of smaller filter types in the past and we know what we don't want so it was a toss up between a 3 stage and a 4 stage but we decided on the 4 stage because it had the storage tank and we had no intention of moving for a while and if we did then this is a very good asset to have in our house. Perhaps if we were only renting we would have gone for a 3 stage RO Unit.

So the day arrives and our new Reverse Osmosis system is here ready to be installed. Now I must confess here I am the sort of person that hates reading instructions but when all else fails that's when you read the instructions right! Luckily Ken is far more switched on than me so the installation was left entirely to him.

Step by step he followed the easy to read instructions and within a couple of hours our brand new RO system was fully operational. Complete with a lovely chrome tap on the sink and he even asked me where I would like to have the tap situation! Our sink is a double sink so we decided that that the best option was near the existing tap so we can put large jugs into the sink to fill them up with ease. I had to lose the top section of the cupboard under the sink but that didn't matter.

You have no idea on how the family was so excited about having such great drinking water. The kids would put all their friends through a taste test and it was funny watching them taste test the RO water and the ordinary tap water. It was very obvious which was the preferred water.

We also have a water testing kit which tells us what the level of TDS (Total Dissolved Solids) ppm (parts per million) is. The Geraldton water on average tests to approximately 680ppm TDS (on a good day) and with our RO Unit the water tests at around 30ppm TDS. Anything that test above 250ppm TDS will still give you that foul tasting water. Some Perth suburbs test around 380ppm TDS depends where you live and these levels are getting higher all around Australia.

The other thing that we were amazed about was the quality of some bottled water you buy. We tested a lot of supermarket brands and believe me when someone says to you "oils ain't oils" well "water ain't water" either. Some were not much better than your own tap water.

So finally some 8 years later of buying 2 bottles each week at $10 per bottle our search for the "holy grail" of water purifiers has finally ended. We now finally have a 4 Stage Reverse Osmosis System installed in our family home and the price was affordable not like the old days of $2,000 but more a realistic price where the top of the range for a 4 stage Reverse Osmosis system is only around $499.00 and a 3 Stage RO System is only $299.00.

After all the years of buying expensive water we could have brought an RO Unit many times over. Within 6 months of using our 4 Stage Reverse Osmosis System it has paid for itself. The filters are of excellent quality and easy to replace only costing around $40 for the complete filter kit every 12 months. This is one decision that we have never regretted only wished we had done it years ago for the sake of our good health and our bank balance!

After 5 years living in Geraldton and the kids had finally completed their education (well schooling education) and we all moved back to Perth. We are now in the process of establishing our new water filtration web site complete with a new name which is Gr8water Filters. You will still receive great service and great prices plus we can now offer to all our customers top quality water filters and systems with a 5 year warranty

All our systems are fully tested, certified and meet the Australian Standards and also the Plumbing Association safety standards. So you can have peace of mind when one of these units is installed at your home.

PLUS even if something happens to your unit once it is out of warranty and you have been getting your replacement filters from us we will make sure your looked after even to the point of sending you the parts for free because after all you are our customer and we feel that it is the right thing to do by looking after you as a very special thank you for supporting our business.

So if you find yourselves in this situation and want better quality drinking water for your family please contact Ken or Sue at Gr8water Filters on 1300 88 1476 or visit our web site www.gr8water.com.au to find out more about what types of water systems best suit your needs. Don't get conned into buying a system that doesn't suit your family needs or budget. We may not know everything there is to know about water filtration but we can help you make a very informed decision.

At Gr8Water Filters because of what we went through we would like your family to enjoy good quality drinking water without the hassle. So if your thinking about a water filtration system please call us now on 1300 881 476 and this will be a decision you will never regret. We really do care about your family's health.

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