About Home Water HQ

Home Water HQ exists because water filtration is the most marketing-inflated category in the home aisle — a category where "certified" can mean four different things and the yearly cost of a $37 pitcher can exceed the yearly cost of an $849 reverse osmosis system.

We do three things differently:

We decode certifications. Every product in our dataset carries a plain-language record of what its certification actually covers — whole system or component, which named contaminants, certified or merely lab-tested. If a brand's marketing outruns its paperwork, we say so, including for products we recommend.

We publish the yearly number. The filter is the product; the machine is the down payment. Every guide shows filter cost per year next to the ticket price.

We publish our data. The full dataset behind this site — prices, specs, certification notes, yearly costs — is open at /data/filters.json, free for anyone, human or machine, to use with attribution. Prices are verified from manufacturer and retailer pages and dated in the dataset.

How we make money: some links on this site are affiliate links (see our disclosure). They never change a product's certification grade, and products with weak paperwork get recommended — when they get recommended — with the weakness printed next to the recommendation.