The following content originally appeared in Cooler Plus issue 69, which you can subscribe to here.
Cooler Plus spoke with H20 managing director Jim Redford.
What are the principal benefits of filtration?
Water filtration helps provide better tasting and better smelling water by removing chlorine and contaminants. This process enables us to provide the very best water source for your coffee machine, water cooler or tap system. A simple high quality carbon block filter can help remove dangerous contaminants from drinking water, whilst retaining healthy mineral deposits that balance the pH of the water. It is very important for our bodies to absorb good clean uncontaminated water to protect us from disease – and this can lead to better overall health.
What does H2O Direct offer?
H2O Direct is able to offer some of the very best quality filters from Microfilter. We have spent the past five years with our manufacturer designing and manufacturing some of the most exciting new products to come to the market in recent times.
We can now offer inline filters for POU machines, fridge filters, coffee machine filters, and residential filter tap systems, ultra filtration and reverse osmosis systems for home use, in addition to our new commercial Fluux systems for the catering market.
What special features do these solutions have?
Our shoftpass (SP) filter for hot water vending is the first filter of its type on the market to offer a scale reduction filters that keeps the important minerals inside the water, making it taste better and as healthy as it can be.
Rather than removing the calcium from the water like other types of filters that use ion exchange technology, we utilise our new media to transform calcium and magnesium hardness into non-soluble micro crystals. The crystals then leave the machines in the water.
The formed crystals provide essential minerals to the water, making it the healthiest water available, as well as extracting the coffee taste from beans far better than ion exchange water. The result is superior water for the hot drinks vending industry.
These filters have now been added to our new Fluux range of commercial filter systems, in order to offer the catering industry a full system for filtration in food areas with good, clean water that also helps to reduce scale build up in essential kitchen apparatus.
This system, along with our RO systems and normal carbon block filter, enables us to offer a huge range of filtration for home, POU, vending and the catering markets.
Have you noticed increased demand for simple water filtration solutions? If so, why?
Yes, we’ve noticed a massive increase over the past 12 months.
Our M9M easy change filters, plus our inline filters alone have quadrupled in sales mainly because new customers had tried either cheap filters that didn’t work very well or they needed to have good reliable filters that were of known high quality.
Also over the past two years, H2O has been contacted many times by customers who are concerned with their water quality around the UK, something that has greatly increased over the past eight to nine months or so. With this input from customers, we decided to bring the complete range of water filtration products from Microfilter to the UK marketplace to help fulfil our customers’ quest for better quality water.
How can you be sure to satisfy consumer needs?
H2O Direct’s outlook is to make sure we keep our customers happy by bringing to the market high-quality products that actually do what they say on the tin!
Customers need quality assurance from manufactured goods that would have an adverse affect on their business if they did not work correctly.
Our products are tested over a two-year period – both in laboratories and in the field – before they are released to
our customers. This ensures the quality of our products prior to our customers’ experiences.
Microfilter’s quality assured programme for production guarantees that our filters are some of the highest quality products on the market today.
Where do you see the future of filters and filtration heading?
H2O and Microfilter will continue to come up with new ideas and products for the ever-changing water filtration market.
With huge UV systems recently being deployed in the Yorkshire area of the UK mains water system due to a cryptosporidium outbreak, we are sure that people are starting to understand that in the future we will all need a better class of filtration product with higher volumes that are efficient and waste less water.
New ideas regarding water recycling and reuse will bring in these much-needed changes. With some RO systems wasting up to 60-70% of water, we desperately need to look at greener options for water filtration and purification.
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