Role of Water Filters in Purification of Water

Water, Sanitation and Hygiene are some of the most basic needs for human health and survival. Specially pure drinking water is of utmost importance among sanitation and hygiene concepts, keeping in view the study is planned to take a overall view of drinking water availability in urban area and performance of various water filters available in market. Water samples fromMunicipal water works, Tubewells and Handpump were tested. Five types of filters i.e Membrane filter, Candle filter, UV-rays+candle filters, Chemical treatment filters and three steps filter were selected for bacteriological analysis of water. Contaminated unfiltered water samples were taken purposively for the testing.After filtration it was found that UV rays+candle filter(F1) and three Steps filter (F2) were best in terms of removing impurities in terms of coliform count, faecal coliform count and viable count present in all three sources of water. F3 filter (chemical filters) had removed all the impurities present in unfiltered handpump water and reduced the impurities approximately ten times from other two sources of filter i.e. water from waterworks and tubewell. F4 filter (candle filter) and F5 (membrane filter), ranked III and IV respectively because these filters were found to remove the above mentioned impurities to some extent. It was also found from the available results that F3, F4 and F 5 filters were proved to be much more effective when the bacterial counts were less in unfiltered water taken from the all three sources. Thus, it can be concluded that F1 and F2 filters are best out of five filters tested in terms of performance evaluation and are, therefore, recommended for use by the consumers.