A Filter on the Shower

What I have

A dedicated filter on the shower, separate from the drinking water system.

Why this is not an afterthought

It is the part people skip, and it is the one I would argue hardest for.

Chlorine and chloramine are volatile. In a hot shower they come out of the water and into the air, and you stand in that air breathing deeply for ten minutes with warm skin. Inhaled is a more direct route into the bloodstream than swallowed — it bypasses the digestive tract entirely.

So a house with filtered drinking water and an unfiltered shower has solved the smaller of the two exposures and left the larger one running twice a day. The water you drink gets a six-stage system; the water you breathe was getting nothing.

Why the rating matters more than the price

Chloramine is harder to remove than chlorine and increasingly what municipalities use, precisely because it is more stable in the pipes. That stability is exactly why a filter rated only for chlorine is not enough — it is the more persistent compound that survives the filter that was not designed for it.

Check what it is certified to remove, not what the box says it removes.