So, you’ve read all about alkaline ionized water, and now you want to start drinking it. We can relate, it’s a road we’ve walked down too.
How do you get your hands on it though? Can you make it yourself, or should you buy it in bottles from a local supplier or a more expensive named brand?
Where to Start?
When it comes to alkaline ionized water, the only real option is to make it yourself with a water ionizer.
Store-bought bottled solutions only offer a fraction of the proven health benefits in comparison, and they are typically produced through chemical methods. This ensures that the alkaline pH doesn’t degrade, but it’s far from the ideal process.
On the other hand, local sellers bottling up homemade alkaline ionized water pose a different problem. By nature, alkaline ionized water loses its properties exponentially once it has been produced. Therefore, the pH and ORP will grow weaker every minute it stays sat in a bottle.
As a result, by the time you’ve purchased and consumed the “alkaline ionized” water, it will have decreased considerably in efficacy.
Understanding Water Ionizers
So, you now know that a water ionizer is the best way to get started with alkaline ionized water. However, you may well want to know what a water ionizer is and how it works.
| What is a Water Ionizer? |
A water ionizer is a machine that can ionize and alkalise water through electrolysis. This process splits the water into two different flows, an acidic flow with a positive ORP and an alkaline flow with a negative ORP. The alkaline flow is ideal for drinking, and the acidic waste flow is suitable for cleaning. |
Cutting away the jargon and focusing on the basics, a water ionizer takes standard tap water and turns it into alkaline ionized water.
Understanding all the details about how it does that isn’t overly important, but it is helpful to have a general idea. So, let’s take a look at how a water ionizer works.
How Does a Water Ionizer Work?
Now, at the most basic level, a water ionizer works by splitting the source water flow into two streams. The first stream contains alkaline water and has an all-important negative charge. The second stream contains acidic water and is typically disposed of through a waste pipe.
If science isn’t your thing, that level of understanding should be enough to get your head around the ionizing process. However, for those craving the details, let’s go deeper into the science.
Now, when it comes to ionizers, a word most commonly associated with them is electrolysis. This is the name of the process they use to break the water into two separate streams.
What Makes a Good Water Ionizer?
Even though they all use the same process to produce alkaline ionized water, not all ionizers are equal. As with all electrical goods, many different brands manufacture ionizers, and some are better than others.
That divide between models is caused by numerous factors, but some are more critical than others. For starters, materials matter a lot, especially in the electrode plates found within the ionizer.
A high-quality and reliable ionizer will always use Titanium plates coated in an even layer of Platinum. Lower quality models that use impure Titanium or skimp on the Platinum coating never perform as well and always fall short of expectations.
Beyond the plates, it’s also important to ensure that an ionizer has internal water filters of suitable quality to ensure no adverse chemical reactions during the electrolysis process. Such reactions are unlikely, but source water quality can vary widely over the world.
Finally, and most importantly, always take a look at the manufacturer’s official performance results. While these won’t provide a realistic view of the ionizer, they will show what it can achieve in absolutely ideal circumstances.
By looking at its peak, it’s easy to work out if an ionizer is likely to meet your expectations or not at standard levels. Although, this rule doesn’t apply in absolutely every scenario.
Why are Water Ionizers So Expensive?
Honestly, the reason behind the high price of ionizers is surprisingly obvious. It all comes down to the materials used and the manufacturing costs associated with those materials.
The largest contributors are the Titanium and Platinum plates. Both are high-value metals and both have to be heavily purified to be effective as electrodes.
Additionally, to ensure the Platinum is evenly coated across the base Titanium most manufacturers have to use expensive nano-spraying processes.
Beyond the metal plates, producing the membranes between them is also costly and requires micro-layering of materials such as silicone to produce the necessary complex structure.
Overall, while they don’t often look that premium from the outside, an ionizer carries a whole lot of value on the inside.
Which are the Best Water Ionizers to Buy?
Opinions on the best ionizers currently available are often very divisive. However, for us, the best water ionizers to invest in right now are produced by AlkaViva. In particular, we recommend their Vesta H2 and Delphi H2 models, which are our current top picks for 2021.