Whole-home carbon filtration in Denver and the Front Range

Contact time is the whole game

Catalytic carbon breaks chloramine down as water passes through the bed, and that reaction needs time. The industry measures it as empty bed contact time: the volume of media divided by the flow rate through it.

This is where undersized systems disappoint people. A small tank on a three-bathroom house moves water through too fast, so chloramine leaves with barely any reduction and the shower still smells. We size the tank to your bathroom count and peak flow, not to a box on a price sheet.

It is also why cartridge filters struggle with chloramine. A 4.5 by 20 inch cartridge cannot hold enough carbon to give water the time it needs at whole-house flow.

Upflow, no drain, no electricity

We run catalytic carbon as an upflow tank with no backwash cycle. Water enters at the bottom and rises through the bed, which keeps the media lifted and evenly used instead of packing down.

The practical result is a system with no drain line, no electricity and no regeneration water. For homes with no floor drain near the main, that is often the difference between a clean install and a plumbing project.

A sediment prefilter goes in front of it. Grit shortens the life of any media bed, and the prefilter is the cheapest part in the system to change.

What it costs to run, and how you know when the media is spent

Carbon capacity is finite. It works until the bed is exhausted and then it quietly stops working, so we treat this as something to measure rather than promise. How long it lasts depends on your chlorine level and your water use, which is why the answer is a test, not a number on a brochure.

Our guarantee covers the numbers at install. After that, the useful habit is a periodic total chlorine check at the kitchen tap. When the reading starts climbing back toward your utility's level, the media is due.