Home Treatment Strategies for PFAS

While a small amount of PFAS may enter the body through the skin during showering, dermal uptake from contact with water of little significance as compared with ingestion of PEAS-contaminated water or contamination from food packaging.  Therefore, the practical strategy for home treatment is to eliminate PFAS from drinking water and not worry a lot about water for bathing or other household uses.

For drinking water, reverse osmosis is a sure thing. It removes PFAS handily.  A good carbon drinking water filter is also a reliable PFAS reducer.  High quality carbon block cartridges have an impressive range for PFAS.  Our standard double undersink filter with MatriKX PB1 and CTO+ cartridges is rated for over 6000 gallons of PFAS removal between cartridge changes. That’s a lot of drinking water. The usual “change once a year” recommendation applies.

For point of entry (whole house) treatment, if you want high PFAS reduction you’ll need to reduce your service flow rate and change cartridges often. A single MatriKX CTO+ in whole house 4.5″ X 20″ size has a 21,000 gallon PFAS reduction capacity at 3 gallons per minute. Two of these installed in parallel would give a 42,000 gallons capacity at a service flow of six gallons per minute.

PFAS can also be effectively treated with ion exchange. This strategy is often used by municipal water suppliers, but is not currently as practical or as affordable for home use as carbon filtration and reverse osmosis.