Does Boiling Water Remove Contaminants?
Heat can kill germs, which is why some people recommend washing your clothes and dishes in hot water. Surgeons even use heat to sterilize their tools! Does this mean that you can purify your own tap water by boiling it first? It’s possible, but there are a few things you should know before taking this approach.
How Does Boiling Water Remove Pollutants?
First, let’s discuss the science behind it. How is it possible that boiling water can remove contaminants?
Bringing water to a boil kills or inactivates bacteria, viruses, protozoa, and other pathogens because the heat damages the structural components of the cells, essentially making it impossible for those viruses and bacteria to function properly.
While it might seem like a small distinction, it’s still important to note: Boiling is not the same as sterilization. Technically, it’s closer to pasteurization. You probably already know this word: Many brands pasteurize their milk by heating it to a certain temperature, which not only kills dangerous contaminants but also helps to extend the shelf life.
Cooking is another method of pasteurization. You wouldn’t eat raw chicken because it could make you sick, but once you cook it, you’re (most likely) safe.
Why does this matter? Well, pasteurization isn’t as powerful as sterilization. Both involve heat, but sterilization typically reaches a higher temperature to eliminate all microorganisms from the item. (Imagine a surgeon looking at his tools and saying, “Well, they’re not totally clean but that’s okay!” This is why sterilization is so crucial.)
Pasteurization, on the other hand, tries to find a balance between making something safe to eat or drink and maintaining flavor, nutritional content, and some of the good bacteria. This means that pasteurizing (boiling) your water at home likely isn’t getting it as purified as you think.
How Do You Pasteurize Your Tap Water?
For boiling your water to actually do anything, remember that there are two main factors:
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The temperature you heat the water to
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How long you heat it at that temperature
If we go back to milk, as an example, in the US, many companies use High Temperature Short Time (HTST) pasteurization. This entails raising the temperature of the milk to at least 161°F for no less than 15 seconds. This is then followed by rapid cooling.
Does Boiling Your Water 100% Purify It?
Ah, herein lies the problem! We already touched on this but it’s worth going into more detail.
For your tap water, research tells us that at temperatures just below boiling (212°F), pathogens are killed or inactivated. In fact, pasteurization can happen starting at around 131°F. However, here’s the tricky part. Bringing water to different temperatures for different amounts of time will kill or inactivate different contaminants.
So, you might boil it for a minute at 131°F and kill only one type of bacteria, leaving others behind. In some cases, you might need to heat water for 20 minutes to kill dangerous organisms like giardia and salmonella.
What this means is that not only is boiling your water less effective than other methods of purification, but even doing it correctly does not mean you are 100% purifying your water. In fact, it’s impossible to make water completely “clean” by bringing it to a boil. Boiling water will not remove:
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Chemicals like lead, arsenic, fluoride, pesticides, fertilizers, industrial chemicals, and hormones. In fact, boiling can increase the concentration of some contaminants, like lead.
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Microplastics.
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Neurotoxic microorganisms.
To Recap: The Drawbacks of Boiling Your Water to Clean It
Let’s summarize what we’ve learned so far:
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Different contaminants respond to their own temperatures and times. To effectively clean your water by boiling it, you must know how high to heat your water and for how long, to kill or inactivate dangerous bacteria and viruses.
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Boiling your water still isn’t as effective as other forms of purification, like reverse osmosis (RO) — more on that in a moment.
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Even if boiling your water to remove contaminants works, it’s inconvenient.
How to Effectively Purify Your Water (Quickly and Conveniently)
We didn’t always have the technology to clean our drinking water, and once upon a time, maybe boiling it was the best we could do. But thankfully, these days, we have other options that are faster, easier, and far more effective. Presently, the most powerful form of water purification is something called reverse osmosis.
The best analogy we can give you to explain reverse osmosis is to think of it like a window screen. A window screen is meant to keep the bugs and critters out. The holes in the mesh are very fine so that air can flow freely, but creepy crawlers can’t.
That’s kind of how reverse osmosis works!
It’s a mesh screen with very fine holes. They’re so small in size that the only thing that can get through them is water molecules. The Sans water purifier, for instance, uses a four-layer reverse osmosis filter to remove impurities down to 0.0001 microns in size. The UV-C purification adds a final level of defense against pathogens, like viruses and bacteria, which can make you sick.
This is why Sans can remove more than 99.9% of fluoride, 99.9% of microplastics, 99.3% of lead, more than 98.8% of PFOA and PFOS (forever chemicals), 98.6% of chromium, and more. These are contaminants that can damage your brain, kidneys, bones, thyroid, liver, and beyond. They can hurt fertility, cause other reproductive issues, and increase your risk of cancer.
What Else Should You Look for in a Water Purifier?
What we described above are the must-haves, but there are additional features that can make your water purifier even more convenient. Sans uses a real-time water quality monitor so that you always know where your H2O stands. The removable glass pitcher auto-refills, so you always have clean drinking water on hand, and it instantly dispenses hot water for your coffee or tea.
What Sans offers is a low-maintenance, hands-off method of purification that gives you crystal-clear drinking water 24/7/365. Learn more about how our water technology works.