Water filter guides for British kitchens

How to use these guides

Under-sink filtration is one of those purchases where the right answer depends almost entirely on where you live. A household in Aberdeen and a household in Chelmsford draw water of completely different mineral content from the same national network, so advice written for a general audience tends to be either over-specified or useless. These guides are written around UK supplies, UK plumbing standards and the hardness bands published by British water companies.

If you are starting from scratch, read the hard water areas guide first to establish what your supply is actually like, then the buying guide to narrow down between carbon filtration, scale reduction and reverse osmosis. The reverse osmosis versus carbon comparison is worth reading before you spend the extra on an RO system, because in soft water regions a carbon block often delivers the same perceived improvement in taste for a fraction of the price.

Once you have chosen, the fitting walkthrough covers the installation sequence for a standard UK cold feed — isolating valve, tap hole, housing mount, push-fit connections and the initial flush — and the cartridge guide sets out realistic service intervals so you are not replacing media earlier than you need to, or running it long past the point where it still works.

Where our advice comes from

We sell under-sink filtration and nothing else, so the guidance here reflects what we see in customer questions, returns and warranty claims: cabinets that turn out to be too shallow for a pressure vessel, tap holes cored at the wrong diameter, membranes fouled early because a pre-filter was left in for two years. Where a claim depends on published data — hardness figures, contaminant reduction rates, flow rates — we cite the source rather than round it in our favour, and we say plainly when a cheaper product is the sensible choice.

What we cover, and what we deliberately leave out

These guides deal with point-of-use filtration: what sits under a kitchen sink, what it removes, what it costs to run and how to fit it without calling a plumber. We do not cover whole-house softeners, borehole treatment or commercial systems, because those are different products with different regulations and we have no first-hand experience selling or servicing them. Where a question genuinely falls outside under-sink filtration, the honest answer is to point you at your water company or a qualified installer, and that is what we do.

You will also notice we avoid contaminant scare copy. UK mains water is microbiologically safe and tightly regulated; filtration here is about taste, chlorine, limescale, dissolved solids and old lead pipework in pre-1970 housing stock, not about making tap water safe to drink. Framing it any other way would sell more systems and mislead people, so the guides stick to the improvements you can actually notice in a glass, a kettle and a coffee machine.

How often the guides are reviewed

Water hardness bands, cartridge specifications and delivery terms all change, so each guide is reviewed at least twice a year and updated whenever a product it references changes. Figures quoted in litres, microns or milligrams per litre come from manufacturer datasheets or published water company data rather than from rounded marketing claims. If you spot something out of date or that contradicts your own supply data, email us and we will check it and correct the page.