Water Mandala - About Water

About Water
In the end, it is all about the quality of your water.

Without good, safe water no amount of energizing, alkalizing, or clustering will be of any benefit.

Many companies that produce enhanced water products either purify the bottled water they sell or include some type of water treatment process in the enhancement device.

That is all well and good, but because these are specialty products, the cost is FAR HIGHER than using tap water, standard home water treatment devices, or even regular bottled water.

Check the NSF International certification listings for any water enhancement (or standard treatment) devices you might consider purchasing. NSF certifies that water treatment products and bottled water actually perform as advertised. You will find that most enhanced water products are not NSF certified, while those that are certified typically have a very short list of contaminants they are certified to remove. There are NO certification processes available for any enhanced water claims.
Search for NSF certified products:
Water Treatment Devices | Bottled Water

If you have concerns about the quality your tap water, you can treat your own water with NSF certified products for a fraction of the cost of the proprietary enhanced water devices of unknown quality and for hundreds to thousands of times less than the enhanced bottled water products on the market.

Although Water Mandalas do not purify water, they are equally effective as the commercial products at energizing and structuring, tap water, water you treat yourself, and even very heavily contaminated water like coffee, orange juice, beer, or even milk shakes.

Pure Water Hype

Pure water, as promoted by companies that sell "ultra-
pure" bottled water or companies that claim their
treatment devices produce "super pure" water, is just
a marketing scheme to extract more money from
your wallet.

What is important is that your water is safe, in other words, free of HARMFUL biological or chemical contaminants. Probably more than half of the water you take into your body during the day is not "pure". In fact it is often very heavily contaminated with a huge variety of minerals, salts, and organic substances (think of tea, wine, milk, yogurt, or even chicken soup). Drinking a few glasses of ultra-pure water (which will become contaminated with saliva and bacteria the instant it hits your mouth) will make absolutely no difference in how the water is absorbed or utilized by your body throughout the day.

Effective, low cost home water treatment systems include:

> Solid Block Activated Carbon Filtration (SBAC) - the most cost effective, low maintenance water treatment systems available. SBAC Filters effectively reduce the most common, harmful contaminants found in municipal water and many wells for under $0.10 a gallon (that's about one cent for a 16oz. bottle of water). Water is filtered as you use it, so you do not have to wait for a storage tank to fill.
- Avoid Granular Activated Carbon Filters -
Save on the most effective SBAC filter here.

> Reverse Osmosis (RO) - effective at reducing heavy metals but will need a carbon filter for effective reduction of organic contaminants. RO treats water for about $0.15 - $0.20 cents a gallon and requires moderate maintenance. The filtration process is slow, and RO wastes 2 - 4 gallons for every gallon filtered.

> Distillation - the most effective, slowest, and most expensive ($0.30/gallon or more) water treatment method. Moderate maintenance is required, and the distillation process is slow. Most contaminants are removed by a good distillation system providing a very pure water. There are a lot claims on the Internet about the health effects of distilled water. Despite claims made by manufacturers, distributors, and many health sites, there is no reliable evidence that very pure distilled water is any better for your health than water that is free of harmful contaminants and produced by Solid Block Activated Carbon filtration or RO. There is also little to no reliable evidence that drinking distilled water is harmful to health, as often claimed by those selling filtration devices.

> Ultra Violet disinfection - in situations where your source water is biologically unsafe you may wish to add an ultra violet system to one of the above treatment methods. Ultra violet light only kills pathogens, it does not remove chemical contaminants.

> Bottled Water - this alternative is included in the discussion, NOT because it is typically a good substitute for the treatment methods discussed above, but to bring awareness to the fact that for regular daily use, bottled water is an extremely expensive and environmentally damaging source of water. Bottled water costs hundreds of times more than filtered water, requires resources to manufacture and distribute, and it can sit in plastic bottles for months before use. Over one forth of the bottled water sold is just tap water that has been processed by the above methods and bottled.

You can have good quality water available to drink throughout the day that has the same health benefits as bottled water which might have been shipped half-way around the world. Invest in a good home water treatment system and reusable water bottles, and you can save hundreds of dollars a year and enjoy great quality water all the time.

Additional Information at Drinking Water Resources

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Water - H₂O - consisting of just three atoms (one oxygen and two hydrogen), is an extraordinary substance with very unique properties. Because of these properties, some of which are described below, water is literally the foundation of all life on earth.

The Water Molecule.

In a water molecule the hydrogen atoms are attached asymmetrically to the oxygen atom by pairs of shared electrons. Overall, there are as many electrons as protons in a water molecule so it is electrically neutral, but oxygen is the dominant partner in the relationship and attracts the negatively charged electrons more forcefully.

These characteristics result in an unequal distribution of negatively charged electrons: the oxygen "side" of the molecule is negatively charged compared to the hydrogen "side" resulting in an electrically polar molecule.

Opposite charges attract, so the Hydrogen (positive) end of a water molecule will form a connection with the Oxygen (negative) end of another water molecule. This connection is called a Hydrogen Bond, and it is relatively weak. In liquid form, water molecules are fairly close together and they are in constant motion - hydrogen bonds form, break, and reform very rapidly.
The Hydrogen Bond
Water�s polarity and ability to form hydrogen bonds � not only with other H₂O molecules, but many other types of atoms and molecules as well � gives it properties described below that make life as we know it possible on Earth.

Water is a liquid over a wide range of temperatures common on Earth (0^o C to 100^o C) instead of a solid or a gas � The hydrogen bonds pulls water molecules close together and makes them harder to separate than small, non-polar molecules like molecular nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and oxygen which are not attracted to each other and are gasses at typical Earth temperatures. On the other hand, water molecules are not so tightly bound together at temperatures between 0^o C and 100^o C like many atoms and molecules (iron, carbon, lead, calcium carbonate, etc.) that they form solids. Life as we know it can only exist in a liquid water environment. Gas molecules are too far apart, disorganized, and energetic to form the complex structures required for life as we know it, and solids are too, well -- solid, to allow the rapid chemical reactions and transport of nutrients and waste products required to support life.

Water is an extremely good solvent � Because of its small size and electrically polar structure, water dissolves a wide variety of substances, particularly other polar compounds (including many organic molecules) and ionic substances like salt. Liquid water can also suspend small particles making them available to the dissolved substances in the surrounding solution.

Water is one of the few known substances where its solid form is less dense than the liquid - Ice floats instead of sinking. Water molecules are closest together (most dense) at 4^o C and the molecules move slightly farther apart as they freeze. This may not seem like a big deal, but consider what would happen if ice were denser than the liquid water and behaved like most solids � sinking instead of floating. In the winter ice would form and sink to the bottom of the lake or river. In the spring and summer the sun�s energy would melt the top few inches of ice � so instead of having deep seas, lakes, and rivers where life can develop and flourish, Earth would be a solid ball of either rock or frozen water with a thin film of liquid water above the ice during summer months.

Living organisms have developed to take advantage of the properties of water in a number of ways. At the most basic level, virtually all of life�s chemical reactions take place in water solutions filled with ions, dissolved gasses, a plethora of simple molecules, and the complex organic molecules necessary to create cellular structures and to organize and control the chemical processes we define as life. Water transports needed substances to the living cells, removes waste products, and transmits chemical signals necessary for inter/intra-cellular communications. The ability of water to form hydrogen bonds also controls the three-dimensional structure (and thus the biological activity) of the proteins and nucleic acids that direct a cell�s activities.

There are many other important and unique characteristics of water that can be explored at these sites:
About Water

Water Crystals - Images by the world's premier snowflake photographer, Kenneth G. Libbrecht of Caltech.