About The Water Standards

What this site is

The Water Standards is a small, independently run site about what is in drinking water and what can be done about it. It covers the substances that turn up in tap and well water, where they come from, the limits that regulators set for them, how to find and read the report for your own supply, and how the different kinds of treatment and filtration actually work.

It is not owned by, sponsored by or paid by any manufacturer, retailer or trade body in the water treatment industry. Nobody has bought a mention on this site and nobody can.

How a guide gets written

Every guide starts from published documents and lists them. You will find the sources at the foot of each article, and you can click each one and read the original — that is the point of publishing them rather than summarising them out of view.

Sources are chosen in that order of preference:

1. The body that sets the rule. If the subject is a legal limit, the citation is the regulator that set it — the US Environmental Protection Agency, the UK Drinking Water Inspectorate, the European Commission, the World Health Organization.
2. The standards body that defines the test. For what a certification mark on a filter box actually covers, that means NSF/ANSI and the organisations that publish those standards.
3. Universities, public health agencies and peer-reviewed journals for measurement and mechanism.

Manufacturer marketing is not a source. Neither is another website's summary of a document when the document itself is public.

One thing worth saying plainly, because it is unusual: every URL cited in an article is fetched and checked before that article can be published. A citation pointing at a page that does not exist stops the article going live. It is a small mechanical check, and it is the difference between a citation and a decoration.

What this site does not do

This part matters more than the rest, so it is specific rather than a disclaimer:

• No testing. This is not a laboratory and not a review outfit. No water sample has been taken here and no filter has been bought, installed or measured. Every number you read comes from a named document, and the document is linked.
• No product recommendations. No brand, model or retailer is named anywhere on this site, and nothing here tells you what to buy. The guides are about what is in water, what the limits are, and how each kind of treatment works — which is what you need before a product question is even answerable.
• No health claims. The guides will tell you what a substance is, where it comes from, what limit a named regulator has set and why that limit exists. They will not tell you what any substance will do to your body, and attributing such a statement to a study does not change that — it is the impression a page leaves that matters, not who is credited in the sentence.
• No scare copy. Measured facts about drinking water are sometimes alarming on their own. Where that is the case the figure and its source are given, and the writing is left to do nothing further.
• No substitute for a test. Water quality varies by region, by supplier, by private well and even between two taps in one house. Only a certified laboratory can tell you what is coming out of yours.

Money, and how it will be disclosed

There are currently no affiliate links on this site and nothing here earns a commission. No affiliate programme has accepted this site and no product is linked.

If that changes, it will be visible on the page carrying the link rather than buried here — and the disclosure and the links are tied together in how the site is built, so one cannot appear without the other. The privacy and disclaimers page carries the full version.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, it should be fixed rather than defended. Point at the page and say what is wrong with it, and where a source says otherwise if you have one: contact@thewaterstandards.com.