Converting from Brita® Titanium 3 in 1 tap to Ontap Systems filtering

Whilst this tap looks great and you don't need an extra tap for filtered water on your draining board, just doing the maths on filter costs is enough to make you want a more economical filter option. The Brita® filters on their website cost £35.71 each, that's a whacking £142.84 a year, each filter lasts for 3 months or 500 litres, so if you use a lot of filtered water you will be changing even more frequently. There is postage and packing on top of this at around £4.00 per refill. It must be said these filters can be purchased in bulk and from other suppliers at slightly lower cost, should you want to do a long-term investment.

When I was about to install the last of my Brita® stock I decided to do some research and contacted Ontap Systems to see if they did a conversion kit and yes they did! So back in July I placed an order for the conversion kit and a year's supply of filters, which with postage and packing currently comes to £79.50, somewhat less than the cost of 6 months worth of Brita® filters?

Today I noticed that the warning light on the tap had turned red, indication that time was up for my last Brita® filter so I decided to install my new kit. The most difficult part of the job was clearing out the cupboard under my sink! However once this was clear and I'd removed the cupboard door and its mounted waste bin it was easy to remove the Brita® filter housing from its two screws and remove the old filter. It was easy to identify the input pipe for the new system, I just removed one pipe from the housing, by pressing on the ring on the fitting as I pulled on the pipe (the one that goes into the long brass fitting) and held it and the housing over a bucket. This pipe was the input as water flowed out of it when I turned the filtered water tap on my 3 way tap. I marked this with a bit of yellow tape to identify it and removed the other pipe. I then removed the two screws that held the old unit and marking up where the new filters were to be mounted, I screwed the two clips into place. Following the diagram that came with the new filter conversion kit and remembering to remove the packing from the filter housings I plugged the relevant connections in place, made sure the filter housing tops were hand tight and then ran about 3 litres of water through the new system to get the bubbles out. The whole task took less than 10 minutes. All I had to do now was to wipe down the shelf and floor of the cupboard and replace the waste bin and the other 1001 items one keeps in the cupboard under the sink!


Julian Round from Yateley - July 2010