Berkey water filters are considered to be some of the most high-tech water filtration systems available on the market currently. They work without electricity and are great for filtering all the water impurities. Being extremely powerful, these filters can be regarded as purifiers since they exceed the standard water filters’ abilities greatly. They can get rid of most of the unwanted odors, heavy metals, chemicals and foul tastes. And still, it preserves all the healthy minerals in the water. So, with this appliance you get healthy, clean and delicious drinking water.
Big Berkey
The most favoured model of Berkey brand is Big Berkey water filter. If your family is small or medium sized, it will be the best water filtration system for you. You can use it for home, outdoor usage and travel to purify both untreated and treated raw water. Thus, you are free to use it while travelling for filtering water from streams, ponds and lakes. Moreover, you can take it with you for holidays in foreign countries where the regulations of water are below the standards. Still, it can just be used at home, so you’ll have the best quality drinking water.
The appliance is produced of advanced stainless steel. The system is configured with four Black Berkey purification elements. Big Berkey holding capacity is 2.25 gallons. The filter is capable of producing about 7 gallons of filtered water per hour.
It is more convenient to carry this appliance since its upper chamber nests within the lower one.
Royal Berkey
The Royal Berkey system surpasses the Big Berkey in size. It has a larger capacity and is more suitable for big families or for people, who use a lot of water every day. This system will provide you with almost four Black Berkey purification elements, but this one includes only two. Possessing the two elements of Black Berkey, it is able to purify about four gallons per hour, while using four Black Berkey elements, you will get about 8 gallons of cleaned drinking water per hour.
The Royal Berkey also possesses 2 PF-2 filters to reduce the amount of fluoride in the water. It is possible due to just screwing into the filters of Black Berkey.
The same as the Black Berkey, the Royal Berkey includes the upper container ability to store in the lower one. Thanks to this, it is compact enough for storage in a closet or large kitchen cabinets or for portability.
The Royal Berkey is also manufactured of polished stainless steel. It has a capacity allowing to hold about 3.25 gallons of water.
Crown Berkey
The largest model in the Berkey’s “family” is the Crown Berkey so that it can provide a larger number of people (about 150) with pure drinking water. Thanks to its bigger size, it offers more holding capacity, up to 6 gallons. Like the other filters, Crown Berkey is made of advanced stainless steel as well.
The system of this appliance can have up to eight Black Berkey elements. The maximum filtration capacity of this unit is 26 gallons per hour. The very model possesses 2 Black Berkey elements, that’s why it can filter up to 6.5 gallons per hour, but this system offers versatility. It means that, though you start with two elements of Black Berkey, you can expand it to the required number.
The filter also contains an easy flow spigot and 2 PF-2 fluoride filters.
Travel Berkey
If you are interested in more compact systems, the Travel Berkey will be a perfect choice. It’s the best variant when you don’t have much space for its storage or just for travelling. It can provide families of about four people with clean drinking water. Being smaller, still the Travel Berkey possesses the contaminant reduction abilities, which you can find in the larger models of this brand as well.
The Travel Berkey has 2 PF-2 filters and 2 Black Berkey elements. Thus, aside from filtration of all the water pollutants, this system also rids the water of fluoride.
The unit holding capacity is about 1.5 gallons of water. It produces about 2.75 gallons of filtered water per hour.
The system is built of stainless steel; that’s why it is easy to clean the appliance, and it offers the advantage of it being scale buildup and resistant to stubborn lime.
Berkey Light
Berkey Light is a lightweight, more portable and lower cost alternative to the models of this brand made of stainless steel. Considering filtration abilities, the appliance also provides you with the purified water of the same quality.
The unit’s weight is only 7 pounds, and it can hold about 2.5 gallons of filtered water. The unit’s container is produced of advanced co-polyester. It’s transparent, so you can easily define the amount of water available in the upper container.
The Berkey Light can accept 4 Black Berkey filters. This model, in particular, offers two so it can provide about 3.75 gallons of purified water per hour.
If you are a fan of a PF-2 filter, you can purchase it separately, as the appliance is compatible with it.
Imperial Berkey
Imperial Berkey is one more filter created to meet the needs that larger groups of people have. The Berkey upper and lower containers’ sizes are increased as well as the lower container diameter for accommodating about six filter elements.
These exact models possess 2 PF-2 fluoride filters and 2 Black Berkey elements. The storage capacity of this unit is rather good (4.5 gallons) and thanks to two Black Berkey elements it can provide you with about 5.5 gallons of filtered water per hour.
The unit’s body is made of amazingly durable stainless steel. That’s why not only the unit will serve you for a longer time, but also you can be sure that each element of its system will withstand heavy usage and time.
Berkey KDSF Shower Filter
Aside from the products for clean drinking water production, Berkey also designs shower filters that are able to reduce water-soluble heavy metals, hydrogen sulfide, chlorine and microorganisms. In this shower filter, KDF media is also used, which helps to reduce bacteria, fungi, mold and lime scale in your shower. Moreover, the filter is equipped with a great massaging shower head.
What Are Berkey Water Filter Features?
The first Berkey filter appeared on the market in the late 1990’s. A farming community small family founded the company on its production. This water filter production was started with the model of Big Berkey, and gradually the line was expanded with products for meeting different water filtration needs. From then on Berkey filters have been used worldwide in hostile and clean filtration environments. Moreover, they are used by such relief organizations as UNICEF, Missionary organizations and Red Cross for filtering non-drinkable water in 3rd world countries.
The Berkey filters can make pure, good tasting water of almost any water from outside natural sources. They use the all-natural filtration method and do not use any complicated processes or chemicals.
The Berkey filters work without water pressure and electricity. You also don’t have to install it, so you won’t need to call a plumber to make this system run. They are gravity fed. All you need is to pour the water into the top chamber and wait for its coming from the bottom chamber, being pure and ready for consuming.
There are Berkey water filters of different sizes. They vary from the 1.5 gallons (as in Travel Berkey) up to 6 gallons (as in Crown Berkey).
Each Berkey filter has a capacity of about 3000 gallons. You can hardly find any other water filters on the market currently that offer such a water filtering capacity. All these means that, if you use about 10 gallons per a week, you will be enjoying this filter benefits for over 11 years.
The filtering system has a 6-month warranty, and the Black Berkey filtration elements has a 2-year warranty.
Numerous tests of Berkey water filters have showed that their systems reduce the number of viruses to purification standards, pathogenic bacteria, cysts and parasites to non-detectable levels. Toxic heavy metals, including mercury and lead, can also be removed using these filters. Still, they don’t filter out healthy minerals that we need to support our healthy body and mind. Berkey has also equipped some of their products with filters of a PF line that can efficiently reduce arsenic and fluoride.
What Are the Peculiarities of Berkey Water Filters’ Work?
The combination of several methods used by Berkey provides a unique filtering process. Berkey makes its filtration elements of over six media types. Then they are combined into a matrix containing millions of microscopic pores. These pores are too small for the pollutants to pass through. Thanks to this microfiltration, the pollutants get trapped with further elimination from your drinking water.
Moreover, in Berkey filters absorption is used to build an ionic barrier. It helps to block the pollutants that are smaller than the pore size itself. Thus, the filter is also able to remove submicron viruses not using chemicals such as iodine and chlorine.
The aim of the next filtration step is to extract heavy metal ions. It is done thanks to an ion exchange process: the media attracts the ions with further electronically bounding them.
What Are Berkey Water Filters Benefits?
Portability. Since you don’t need neither electricity for the Berkey systems running nor installation, they are very portable. Though some filters are quite big and made for filtering great amounts of water, they can still be carried around. This filters portability makes them perfect in case of emergency situations such as loss of electricity, flooding and other.
Different size options availability. Since Berkey provides a great variety of sizes available, you can pick up the ideal size to meet your needs.
Price. We can hardly say that the Berkey filters are the cheapest. Still considering their lifespan, which is over 11 years, the fact that you won’t need to change your filter every six months as with other standard filters, it is a more money saving choice. It will cost you just 1.7 cents for every Berkey filtered water gallon.
Regarded as a water purifier. Since every brand’s filtration system with the Black Berkey elements conforms to NSF/ANSI standards, they are regarded as water purifiers. It filters parasites and bacteria, heavy metals, toxic chemicals, fluoride, chlorine, arsenic and VOCs.
