How Aquelia works

Gravity, not pressure

Most home filters push water through a cartridge under mains pressure. Aquelia lets gravity do it instead. You pour tap water into the upper glass chamber and it passes slowly through two black carbon elements into the lower chamber. The slow pass is the point, because the longer water spends in contact with the filter media, the more it can capture.

There is no pump, motor or cartridge housing under the sink. That's also why Aquelia keeps working in a power outage.

Inside a black carbon element

Each element is a dense block of activated carbon. Activated carbon has an enormous internal surface area, and many contaminants are captured on that surface as water moves through it. In SGS testing, the elements reduced lead, PFOA/PFOS, microplastics, chlorine, VOCs and many pharmaceuticals and pesticides, with the reported reductions listed on our Lab Results page.

What stays in

Reverse osmosis forces water through a membrane fine enough to remove almost everything, including naturally occurring minerals like calcium and magnesium. Gravity carbon filtration leaves those minerals in your water, which is part of why people describe the taste as soft and round rather than flat.

Capacity and pace

The lower chamber holds three gallons. Because gravity filtration is unhurried, most owners top up the upper chamber in the morning and again in the evening, so there's always a full chamber waiting. One set of elements filters up to 6,000 gallons, which is about ten years for a household drinking 1.5 gallons a day.

Adding the AF-2 stage

If fluoride or arsenic is a concern in your area, the optional AF-2 elements add a dedicated second stage beneath the black carbon elements.