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What Most People Don’t Know About Shower Water in Australia
Apr
Australian tap water is treated to the Australian Drinking Water Guidelines, and part of that treatment is a disinfectant: chlorine, or in some cities chloramine. A little of it is meant to still be in the water when it reaches your house. You can pick it up at the kitchen tap, but the shower is where it stands out, because the water is hot and the bathroom door is shut.
Dealing with it at the shower needs no plumber and no permanent change to the bathroom, which matters if you rent. See shower filters for renters.
What the utility puts in, and why
Utilities disinfect the water so it stays clean on the long trip through the pipe network. That only works if a small amount is still there at the last house on the line, so some of it reaches your taps by design.
Why the shower smells of it more than the kitchen tap
Hot water and steam carry chlorine into the air, and a closed bathroom holds it there. It’s the same water as the kitchen sink. The difference is the heat and the small room.
What a Suhae shower filter does at the shower arm
A Suhae shower filter works at the point where you use the water. Its vitamin C cartridge turns chlorine and chloramine into chloride as the water passes through.
The lab figures come from KEWI, certificate IW-230133: 99.9% of chlorine removed, and none detected across 6,000 litres of water.
What else the water picks up on the way to your shower
Between the treatment plant and your bathroom, water travels a long way through mains and household plumbing. Depending on where you live, it can carry minerals, which is what people mean by hard water, along with trace sediment and fine particles from the pipes.
Suhae Radiance and Suhae Nourish add fine-particle filtration to the vitamin C cartridge.
Not every city uses the same disinfectant
Sydney Water, for one, adds ammonia to chlorine to make chloramine, which lasts longer through the pipe network. Our water by postcode page lists the disinfectant and hardness for each capital city, taken from each utility’s own figures. The vitamin C cartridge acts on both.
A Suhae shower filter goes on by hand in about 2 minutes with no tools, and the cartridge is changed every two to three months, depending on how much the household showers.
So the kitchen tap can stay as it is. The shower is where the chlorine shows up most, and that’s where the filter goes.
