Amazon Basics 2.3L (4 Pints) Water Filter Jug with 1×30 Days

It’s easy to use , no after taste with it and filters the water very well the only draw back with it is that while the jug is 2.3 litre in total it’s filter capacity is 3/4 of a litre so to fill the water container on my coffee machine requires two fillings of the jug. Other than that it does work very well, just as more expensive models

My son and I, between us, drink about 8 litres of water a day. And it had NEVER before occurred to me to filter it. I’d always thought filtering water was the province of fans of pseudo-science and people who had too much time on their hands.

How wrong I was.

After my son and I randomly chatted about how we both felt nauseous after drinking the tap water in our home (we live in the 2nd hardest water area in the country), and after seeing the ENORMOUS pile of plastic drink bottles to come out of my son’s room (when he was finally persuaded to tidy up), I figured it might be time to at least TRY a water filtration system.

So we got this jug.

In terms of value for money, we got the jug and 3 further filters for around 20, which I felt – comparing other, better-known brands – was a good price for 4 months of water (depending on how often we used the jug). And, honestly, my son and I were both excited to give it a go and see whether the water would taste any different after being filtered.

This was at the start of a period of very hot weather, so, knowing how much water we both typically get through in a day, we decided to filter more than we needed (continually refilling the jug) and keep it all in the fridge.

Well, firstly, 8 litres take up a HUGE amount of space in the fridge. And the jug took, honestly FOREVER to filter that much. Very quickly it became apparent that, even for just 2 people, the jug filtration system was unsustainably slow: I wanted to make drinking cold, filtered water a viable alternative to fizzy drinks, not a further chore to be performed lest the water just run out during a heatwave.

Also, there’s the issue of the taste.

After many litres had been passed through the filter, the taste had faded but, at first, there was a significant “chemical tang” (as my son described it) which we couldn’t get rid of, even after multiple washed of the jug and reservoir and soaking the filter, running it under the tap and so on.

Now, my son, though excited to give filtered water a go, is a creature of habit and is particular to how things taste. The weird water taste the jug had lasted long enough to discourage him from drinking any more water from the fridge, even after squash had bee made available to him.

Yes, the taste faded after about 20 litres had been filtered (about 3 days) but it lasted long enough to be prohibitive to him, and the whole filtering – refrigerating process was slow enough to further that disengagement once it had started. It just all became a bit onerous.

HOWEVER.

One the tang had gone, the water tasted SIGNIFICANTLY better than water directly from the tap, and no longer makes me feel nauseous, even when drunk in huge amounts directly from the fridge. If nothing else, this just has persuaded me that filtered water is an absolute must in my home – so I shopped for a tank that can hold 9 litres and uses the same filters as the jug, which we’ll keep for times of the year when we need more space in the fridge and have to remove the tank.

All in all, it wasn’t a disaster. It’s not a bad little jug, and it could be that my inexperience with this sort of thing somehow perpetuated the weird taste we had at first. But if, like me, you have fussy kids who are reluctant to accept change, you really need to let this just filter a lot of water before letting your children try it – and keeping the thing filled with a family drinking from it is going to be a bind.