hi i am johnny i recently bought a Kdf filter i was wondering if u know what readings it would show with a ppm meter. thanx i would appreciate.

There was a study done on ascorbic acid and chloramine (www.lmtf.org/FoLM/Plans/Water/PUCreports/LMJuly6ltrwattachments.pdf)

The results on the test of ascorbic acid on chloramine in water is on page 9 of the report. The resulting ammonia level (NH3) is also shown. Ascorbic acid was effective in neutralizing the chloramine, and at higher doses, in also neutralizing the ammonia. What I can't tell is whether there is enough ascorbic acid delivered by the various "vitamin C" shower filters to achieve similar results.

The neutralization was "nearly instantaneous" according to the report, so running the water through the ascorbic acid may work, but that is an outstanding question as well.

Here is an answer to the original poster's questions, which were, "would the vitamin c react with the chlorine in the chloramines to create hydrochloric acid?" and (to paraphrase), "what are the byproducts of vitamin c reacting with chlorine?"

To answer the second question first--what are the byproducts of vitamin c reacting withchlorine: when vitamin c reacts with chlorine dissolved in water, the byproducts are dehydroascorbic acid (another form of vitamin c) and hydrochloric acid.

The answer to the first question--would vitamin c react with chloramine to produce hydrochloric acid--is no. when vitamin c reacts with chloramine, the byproducts are dehydroascorbic acid, ammonia, and chloride (a form of chlorine which is essential to the body).

What it boils down to is that if your water has chloramine instead of chlorine in it, you don't have to worry about a vitamin c filter creating hydrochloric acid in your shower.

To go on with the question of whether or not Vitamin C, dissolved in water, will indeed react with both chlorine and chloramine (dissolved in water) to neutralize it--yes, it will.

So a vitamin c shower filter will be effective, but from what I've read on the net, there is some concern as to how long a vitamin C filter would last.

First let's assume that the average shower uses about 15 gallons (57 liters) of water.

In my city, the water has about 2mg/l of total chlorine, so for an average shower, 2mg/l x 57 liters = 114mg of total chlorine which would have to be neutralized.

Now, according to the link that your last poster provided, 3.02mg of vitamin C is needed to reduce 1 mg of total chlorine. so for the 114mg of total chlorine in an average shower in my city, we would need 344mg of vitamin C.

According to the vitacshower website, each one of their shower filters has 210g of vitamin c. that would be enough todechlorinate/dechloraminate a little more than 600 showers. Not too bad.

Of course, that is under ideal conditions, and assuming that the vitamin C is consumed at the exact rate necessary to neutralize the free chlorine. If the vitamin C doesn't dissolve fast enough, then chlorine/chloramine will still remain in the water. if the vitamin C dissolves too quickly, then you are wasting vitamin C and the filter won't last as long as its advertised potential.

Vitamin C is quite soluble, so i would think that more of it gets dissolved than is actually needed to neutralize the free chlorine in your shower water. Plus I'm guessing the designers of the filter would err more on the side of using up too much vitamin c to 1) ensure that all free chlorine is eliminated, and 2) shorter life means more frequent replacements, meaning more revenue for them. so the filter will probably last quite a bit less than 600 showers (at 15 gallons/shower), but without testing one can't know for sure.

Another issue is that vitamin c in solution tends to oxidize with air, so even when you're not taking a shower, some vitamin c may be oxidized into dehyroascorbic acid, again reducing the life of the filter.

Call your water supplier to find out if it is Chloramine or Chlorine. As I understand it Chloramine doesn't smell so some prefer it....but I think I also heard it is not removed with some filters that will take out Chlorine.

Aquasmart has a shower filter that filters chloramines.
Go to www.aquasmart.com and scroll down to the botton of page.
Click on the picture of the shower filter.

Hi, I have severe MCS, chloramines in my water and I live in an apartment. The only thing that has worked for me is the vitamin c shower filter. I have tried a number of regular shower filters including the aquasmart filter and have reacted severely to all of them. Now with the vitamin c shower filter if I stay in for a long period of time my skin has a slight itch but it is far more tolerable than the other filters. Since the vitamin c shower filter does not filter toxins I don't stay in it long and also don't have it really hot(I figure my pores won't open and take in as many toxins as well as the filter lasts longer). I'm so grateful for the vitamin c shower filter as I was getting very ill just from having a shower and taking several days to recover from it.

From the site : www.ecologycenter.org/factsheets/waterquality_eastbay.html

Chloramine Removal — Chloramine, unlike chlorine, will not evaporate from water by itself and not all water filters that remove chlorine will remove chloramine. For example, showerhead filters and filter balls that are used in bathtubs do not remove chloramine. Chloramine can be removed for drinking water purposes by a carbon block or activated carbon filter that can be installed on a kitchen faucet. According to the San Francisco Public Utilities District, boiling water for 20 minutes will remove chloramine. A short boil of water to prepare tea or coffee will remove about 30% of chloramine. Adding fruit to a water pitcher, for example slicing peeled oranges into a 1-gal water pitcher will neutralize chloramine within 30 minutes. Both chlorine and chloramine can be removed for bathing purposes by dissolving Vitamin C in the bath water (1000 mg Vitamin C tablet will neutralize chloramine in an average bathtub).

Are there any shower filters that will remove chloramines yet? If not, what else can we do?

A useful article at www.ionizers.org/chlorineremoval.html on the effect of chlorine and the need for chlorine removal states: "Chloramine is already bound to organic matter in the water therefore it cannot bond to skin or hair. There is no chloramine gas therefore no vapors to inhale such as with chlorine." Can anyone confirm this? If it is accurate, the need for shower filtration seems questionable, though the fact that fish and other aquatic organisms are extremely sensitive to chloramine makes me wonder.

Dear Everyone, Please bear with me-this is long but there's so much to say.


I am with People Concerned About Chloramine [PCAC] (www.vce.org/chloramine ), a grass roots citizens group dedicated to the removal of chloramine from our municipal water. We have over 300 people in my water district who have reported mild to severe skin, respiratory and/or digestive symptoms to us since chloramine replaced chlorine in 4/06.

We are working with citizen groups in other states who are dedicated to the removal of chloramine from their water or from going into their water. San Francisco-based Citizens Concerned About Chloramine [CCAC] (www.chloramine.org ) is the oldest of these groups. They formed shortly after chloramine went into their water in 2/04.

Between just CCAC and PCAC there are around 1000 people who have reported chloramine-related symptoms. Many sufferers have tried various kinds of filtration to remove chloramine, from faucet devices all the way to whole house systems (including me- I had all 3 kinds of symptoms moderately). Some people with mild to moderate symptoms may find some relief, some don't get enough relief to have enough good quality of life, and some get no relief whatsoever. 100% of the sufferers (including myself), however, do experience 100% relief when they expose themselves only to water that never had chloramine in it. The reason is very complicated and depends on several factors and I don't know them all. What I do know, though, is that between CA and VT no one has gotten 100% relief from chloramine symptoms using any kind of filtration. This is a vast chemistry experiment and we are the lab rats.

The one kind of filters Debra recommends are catalytic carbon filters. Here's what I know about them: like any filters, they are not going to remove all the chloramine and the older they get the less they remove. Independent engineers (who are not invested in selling filters) confirm that no filter will remove all the chloramine, including expensive whole house filters utilizing catalytic carbon. From the personal experience of sufferers who install these filters, they do not get complete relief, especially if their symptoms are moderate to severe. Some of these people have done expensive testing on their filtered water and demonstrated that a significant percentage of the chloramine is still coming through these filters, even when the filters are relatively new. The whole house catalytic filters must go on the outside line going into the house or building because they cannot be used with warm or hot water- they don't work with warm or hot water. The larger the building and the more people using the water, the more extensive and expensive the filter must be. Even for a small apartment building the estimated expense of installing such a filtration system was $80,00 to $120,000 and upwards. Imagine a person with limited income affording such a system. For nursling facilities, hospitals, and large apartment buildings, the cost of whole building filtration for such places is so prohibitive that it is virtually not doable. Since no point of use filter is useful for bathing, showering, laundry, etc., low income, fixed income, elderly, disabled people, etc. have no choice and no remedy against chloraminated tap water. For those who are made sick by this chemical in the water, which may be as much as 30% of the population, this represents a major social justice issue. Many of the reactions to chloraminated water are life-threatening.

On the topic of vitamin C shower filters. Because of the warm temperature of the water, the volume of the water passing through the filter, and the speed at which the water passes through the filter, the vitamin C shower head filter cannot possibly catch and convert all of the chloramine into certain forms of chlorine and ammonia. So much of the chloramine gets through that filter. The ammonia that is coming through is problematic for people who are sensitive to chloramine because many times they are also sensitive to the ammonia in the water. The ultimate test of a filter is whether or not people with symptoms experience relief. That's really the acid test.

I personally would not use any kind of filtration with chloraminated water. Here's my filtration story. I tried with a very expensive cold water filter that attached to my kitchen sink faucet that used lots of carbon that the water goes through first, very slowly, and then a reverse osmosis membrane (RO), which is supposed to remove the ammonia part of the chloramine molecule. The company I bought it from (for $355) claimed it removed chloramine, that its carbon filters would last a family of 4 for a year and the RO would last a family of 4 3-5 years. The filter replacement was going to be $200 for the 3 carbon filters and the RO. This is the kind of filter device the general manager of my water district recommended as the only kind of filter that would remove chloramine. He explained that the RO (which wasted about 3x more water than it filtered, making my water bill soar) is the only thing that will remove ammonia from the water. I live alone and it failed after 10 months.

The way I found out it was failing was getting a chronic stomach ache that lasted 2 weeks before it dawned on me that maybe the cause of it was something in the filtered water that the filter was no longer keeping out. Sure enough, using the particle counter that came with it, it showed, for the first time that it was removing 89% of the particles, not 100% like it had read previously. I immediately stopped using it and immediately my stomach ache ceased.

Which leads me to this. Chloramine is a seriously inferior disinfectant to chlorine. The World Health Organization (WHO), says that chloramine is about 2,000 and 100,000 times less effective than chlorine at the inactivation of e.Coli and rota viruses, respectively (W.H.O. Guidelines for Drinking Water Quality Vol.2, 1996, Chapter 16). This is but one quote from very legit sources about chloramine's inability to disinfect well. Chloramine is at the bottom of the EPA's list of acceptable municipal disinfectants because it is such a poor disinfectant. As a result, chloramine is never to be used as a primary disinfectant, but only after a more effective disinfectant, like chlorine or UV light, is applied first, can it be then used in the pipeline distribution system.

I'll probably never know what caused my chronic stomach ache, whether it was a chemical irritation from the chloramine itself or whether I was ingesting pathogens (microorganisms, bacteria, viruses) that were wreaking havoc on my stomach due to there being large colonies of them living in the filter media because chloramine wasn't killing them the way chlorine would have.

Water districts tout that a major benefit of using chloramine is its persistence in the water supply. In other words, it doesn't dissipate as easily as chlorine does, and therefor it does not need to be refreshed as often. This saves water districts money. But the downside for the consumer is that since chloramine persists so doggedly in the water, it is nearly impossible to remove and very expensive.

Since chloramine is such an ineffective disinfectant, much higher doses of chloramine are typically used in water systems than were needed with chlorine.

The best remedy for chloraminated water is NOT filtration. The best remedy is to prevent water districts and the EPA from allowing the use of an untested chemical like chloramine at all. To that end our groups are working diligently. Please support us.

Can you please take a look at this link for chloramine reducing filters, and let me know what you think? www.filtersfast.com/Chlor-Plus-Series.pdf
Also, does Winston Kao's Go Beyond Organicwhole-house filter remove chloramines? How does this system work?
Thank you

Well as a friend of mine said....her Amish friend told her if their heat/electricity ever gave out, she could come and stay with them. This kind of thinking could be applied to this problem as well. At the very least, it would seem that one could get water from a sink filter that they already had, heat it and use it in the tub as sort of a deluxe sponge bath. If this sounds way too primitive, you haven't had severe chemical issues or been camping or been hospitalized and unable to take a real bath or shower. It feels pretty good when that is all you have.

I have been developed a device for feeding ascorbic acid (vitamin C) to the feed water of an RO system used for kidney dialysis application in order to eliminate the chlorine and chloramine. The limit for dialysis is 0.1 ppm chloramine. For this application we include an ORP (oxidation reduction potential) electrode and monitor to verify the effectiveness on line.

In researching the overall topic of chloramine I came across concerns and ads for technology to remove the chloramine for domestic uses, especially showers. We have used catalytic activated carbon for more than 10 years in dialysis water systems. It is effective, but it is bulky, heavy, expensive and has high operating costs.

In comparison our ROducer vitamin C feeder is affordable and very inexpensive to operate. For example a 10 minute shower using a 3 GPM shower head and water containing 2 ppm of chloramine would use less than 5 cents of Vitamin C powder!

Other than a volume to allow a 30 second reaction time, the feeder weighs only a few pounds and has no moving parts. The vitamin C is held in a refillable clear plastic tube.

We are now developing a prototype shower unit. It will be approximately 26 inches wide by 28 inches high, 5 inches deep and the whole thing should weigh about 25#. It could be mounted on the wall below the shower head or even hung from the shower head against the wall. At a 3 GPM nominal flowrate, the pressure drop will be less than 5 PSI. Connection to the shower head will be very easy. It will handle water much hotter than a typical shower. We expect the price to be about $750.

The standard test for chloramine is the DPD reagent test. First the total chlorine level is measured and then the free chlorine level is subtracted. Since the free chlorine is so much more easily and quickly removed, there is really no point in performing more than the total chlorine test. A package of reagent pillows for 100 tests is about $25 and is available from hach.com.

Feel free to contact me if you are interested in this.

In this blog you state that kdf 85 does not remove chloramine from water. However I found this on the kdf website.

www.kdfft.com/pdfs/Reductive_Dechloramination.pdf

If you have time I would appreciate you checking it out and letting me know your thoughts. As another poster pointed out, aquasmart makes a kdf 85 filter so if the above info is correct, perhaps we have found a shower filter that will take out chloramine?

Also you had mentioned a concern over possible copper leaching from the kdf into the water. Were you ever able to find out one way or the other as that is a big concern too. What good is filtering out chloramine if you are adding something else just as bad!

thanks