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Inside a Shower Filter Cartridge
The first thing people notice after fitting a shower filter is the smell. Or rather, that it has gone. It happens on the first shower, before anything else does, and it is worth knowing where that came from. Not the shower head. The cartridge inside it.
A housing holds a cartridge, points the water at you, and comes apart when the cartridge is spent. Everything that changes the water happens in the few seconds the water spends inside that cartridge. Which makes the useful question about any shower filter a fairly narrow one: what has been packed into that space?
What is inside a Suhae shower filter cartridge
A Suhae shower filter cartridge holds three stages. Two of them sit in the Purea Core housing between the wall and the spray, and the third works on the chemistry of the water rather than catching anything out of it.
Ceramic beads
A cartridge lives in a warm, wet housing for months at a time, which is a generous environment for anything that would like to grow there. The bead media is tested to resist bacteria growing on it, under KIFA certificate KFIA-110. This is the stage that keeps the cartridge clean on the inside.
Micro fabric
A woven layer that catches what household plumbing carries: sediment, fine debris and rust. It is the one stage you can watch working, because whatever it catches stays on it. Take a spent cartridge out after a couple of months and the fabric has kept a record of what your pipes have been sending you.
Vitamin C, 25,000mg of it
L-ascorbic acid, in the quantity printed on the box. It gives electrons to free chlorine and to chloramine and turns both into chloride, which is the ion already sitting in table salt. That is the reaction behind the smell going, and behind water that feels softer running over your hands.
The difference between reacting and catching is the part worth slowing down on. Carbon works by adsorption: it holds chlorine on its surface, so it fills up and slows down as it does. A reaction has nothing to fill. That is why the durability figure on a Suhae shower filter cartridge reads the way it does. KEWI certificate IW-230133 recorded 99.9% chlorine removal, and found no chlorine at six sample points running from 1,000 litres to 6,000.
Which of the two you are dealing with, free chlorine or chloramine, is decided at the treatment plant rather than at your tap. There is more on that in chloramine and vitamin C.
How long one lasts
Two to three months, depending on how much the household showers. A share house of four gets through a cartridge faster than a couple will, and the 6,000 litre run is the measurement that period is built on.
A replacement is a Vita Refill at AUD $29.90, and the scent gets chosen then rather than being fixed when you bought the head. There are ten: Ocean Calm, Baby Powder, Soft Citrus, Citrus Bloom, Blush Rose, Lavender, Forest Calm, Cool Eucalyptus, Forest Pine, and Pure, which is unscented.
The part you replace, and the part you keep
The cartridge is the consumable. The head is not. It is made in Korea and it carries a lifetime warranty on the hardware. That is the part to hold onto when you compare two shower filters on sticker price alone, because there are two numbers in play. One you pay once. The other keeps arriving every few months, and it is the one doing the work on your water.
Suhae Pty Ltd is an Australian company, ABN 21 695 952 357. Shipping is free Australia-wide and WhatsApp support answers within 24 hours on +61 494 015 898. There are 3,000+ five star reviews across Suhae worldwide.
If the question is which shower filter to buy rather than what is inside one, the Australian shower filter guide puts the lab reports side by side, ours included.
