What are the benefits of a home water dispenser?

By Bob Fear

What are the benefits of a home water dispenser?

A Virgin Pure home water dispenser isn’t the only solution on the market to provide you with filtered water. Naturally we believe ours is the best solution - that’s why we do what we do! But we want to offer you a fair comparison to the other choices. So we took a look at filter jugs, bottled water and integrated taps that filter and dispense hot or cold water and stacked up all the information we could find. We compared each in terms of cost, convenience, sustainability and water quality. Here’s what we found:

How much does each option cost?

Based on cost alone, the cheapest filtered water solution is a filter jug. It has a low one-off upfront cost and monthly replacement filters are also affordable. However, the problems with fridge storage space, a relatively unsophisticated filtration system and the lack of a hot water dispenser means that a filter jug may not be the smartest option overall.

Bottled water may also look like a good solution based on short-term cost. But in the long term you could be spending £2000 more over three years than you would if you invested in a water cooler dispenser for home. Then there’s the unnecessary damage to the planet caused by the high amount of plastic waste you generate every time you buy bottled water.

An integrated filter and boiling tap is the most expensive solution, with a prohibitively high one-off upfront cost. Subsequent ongoing costs are also higher than a Virgin Pure home water dispenser, which also provides you with instant boiling water as well as chilled. You can also choose to spread the initial cost of a water dispenser over monthly payments, making it even more convenient for your finances.How convenient are the options?

A filter jug is probably the least convenient water solution. Not only do you need to change the filter every month (how many people leave old useless filters in their jugs for months on end?) but you obviously need to refill the jug every time you use it. This means you have a relatively small, finite supply of water that you have to wait hours and hours for while it chills. Then there’s the amount of fridge space it takes up.

While bottled water may be convenient, it’s not so convenient for the planet. And it takes up the most space in your fridge. This is where a Virgin Pure home water dispenser comes into play. Once installed, not only do you have unlimited purified chilled water on tap, you also have hot water at the touch of a button. That means you never have to wait, you never have to refill, you don’t need fridge space and you don’t need a kettle. And while an integrated filter and boiling tap offers the same conveniences, it’s a far more costly solution.How sustainable is each option?

Buying bottled water is clearly the least sustainable solution. You’ll be adding nearly 600 times more plastic to the recycling pile across a year than you would if you relied on a hot and cold water dispenser for home. And this is only if you choose to recycle it, otherwise once a year you’ll be adding the equivalent weight of a small cow to the growing piles of plastic waste.

A Virgin Pure home water dispenser is the most sustainable option here, resulting in the least amount of plastic put into recycling every year. We were unable to calculate a fair comparison to integrated filter and boiling taps due to the wide variety of different products on the market, each using different amounts of plastic in their disposable filters and packaging. When we install your dispenser for you, we take all the packaging away with us and re-use it.How does the quality of the water compare?

So which solution offers you the best water? Our research found that most filter jugs will only commit to removing limescale, chlorine, lead and copper from your tap water, whereas a Virgin Pure home water dispenser will remove all of those as well as organic matter and contaminants; herbicides and pesticides; VOCs (volatile organic compounds); and tiny plastic particles that can get into the mains water system as well as into bottled water.

While bottled water doesn’t need filtering, it can still grow bacteria. When stored, both bottled water and filter jugs can potentially breed high levels of bacteria, especially if they’re not refrigerated. The key difference with a home water dispenser is that it contains a UV lamp which kills any bacteria in the water. When you add on the convenience that the system will boil as well as chill your water for you, a Virgin Pure home water dispenser can provide you with better quality water than found in both filter jugs and bought bottles.

Again, we were unable to calculate a fair comparison to integrated filter and boiling taps due to the wide variety of different products on the market, each with different filtration systems. But all of these products were costlier solutions compared to Virgin Pure.So there we have it. Hopefully we’ve made it easier for you to see how these different options compare. The choice, as they say, is yours! 

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