British Berkefeld Gravity Filters: No Need for Bottled Water
by Justin Thomas, Virginia 
on 08.17.05
These British Berkefeld gravity filters are great. They allow you to perform high-quality water filtration on your counter top using gravity alone. The ceramic filters inside last for years, and need cleaning only every three months or so. They're pretty easy to operate too — you just pour water in the top half, it the water drips down the bottom half. After a few hours you have gallons of ready-to-drink water. Ceramic filters remove more than 99% of pathogens in water. You can read about them here.
Other systems such as under-the-sink and on-tap designs, push the water too fast throught the filter for full filtration to occur.
Using this kind of filter you can get clean, drinkable water that is probably of better quality than most bottled water available.
Available from Doulton for $229 or EBay
Follow @TreeHugger on Twitter & get our headlines with @TH_rss!
Thirsty for more? Check out these related articles:
- 5 Reuses for: Watermelon
- Make Your Own Butterfingers
- Stop Buying Packaged Cereal! 5 Awesome Granola Recipes to Try Instead
- 3 Miraculous Mold-Killing Recipes from Green Cleaning Guru, Annie Bond
- Emeril's Chicken Pot Pie
- Shocking Report Reveals Marine Litter Madness (Plus 10 Easy Ways to Help Save Our Oceans!)
Isn't that what the Brita filters do?
Wonderful product. Its a shame they're butt-ugly, they look like a coffee pot from a school cafeteria. Hopefully someone will come out with one more suited to the Treehugger aesthetic. :)
The main difference is the cost, Brita filters need to have their filters replaced much more often. These filters also have a larger capacity, which means you can filter water for cooking as well as drinking, for example.
This is cool. I've got a Katadyn which has a silver-impregnated ceramic filter...but using it is roughly akin to pushing water through a brick. It's the size of the pores in the ceramic that filter out the microorganisms, and the silver inhibits bacterial growth.
Wonder how they managed to do the same thing without much pressure?
Wow, that sounds like a great product. Hmmm. Maybe there are things you could run through this filter other than water? I'm just sayin'.
Sounds great! I was not aware of these.. I'll make a note to my list of "must have" things.
As far the looks from Doulton's page: "These units are intended for use in situations where a reliable supply of safe drinking water is unavailable. Ideal for outdoor travelers, hikers, expeditions, missionaries, etc. Due to their effectiveness at eliminating water-born diseases such as cholera and typhoid, they are being specified for field operations by many of the worlds major aid and emergency relief organizations." However they have a nice looking filter called "Classic Gravity" which they have it on special sale. As far the pore size they are more than 98% efficient at 0.2 microns as published on the following link: http://doultonusa.com/HTML%20pages/technology.htm
I've had gravity ceramic filters for donkey's years.. the older type are terracotta which gives a lovely flavour to the water & the ceramice with charcoal etc inside filters are superior (much bettr than Brita which isn't a very effective filter also use lots of plastic & over time costs lots of $$$$). Other benefit is longer lasting - you scrub the outside of the ceramic candles now & then to remove the sediment. The terracotta is more homely looking & cheaper than this model above. unfort they seem to be slipping out of favour tho, people want new fangled technologies or sthing of the like...