Vitapur GWF8 Water Filtration System For Top-load Water Dispensers , White

HIGHLY recommend this.It has saved me hundreds of backbreaking trips to the store for water, sometimes only to find out the system was down. Loading the jugs, taking them in, having the space!, and finding the time. Bananas.This is quite possibly the BEST purchase I have ever made of anything that serves a daily purpose and function. That people order water delivered in huge jugs to their homes (I did for a very short time!) is insane.I am shocked I haven’t seen them in any home or business that has a water dispenser. GET ONE!!

This is a revised review. This thing's great. The replacement filter I got was great. My local water sucks. As such, I probably got 100 gallons of really dirty water through it before it plugged up.After 9 months & 2 filters I'm coming to terms with the fact that I need a whole house inline filter. Till then? $100 a year in filters is pretty reasonable.

Upon opening the box you get the lower, upper and lid portion of the filter system. In addition it DOES come with the filter assembly. When I first began looking at this item it did not specify if it came with one or not. After letting the filter soak for 30 minutes and running water through it after the thing takes less than five minutes to set up. Very user friendly and easy to install. No tools are required to assemble. The only downside I can make note of is the O-ring around the top portion of the filter that connects to the upper water storage area. It can take quite a bit of effort to get that O-ring to seat into its spot just right so as not to allow it to slip out while installing, which would allow unpurified water to leak into the lower tank. But that is not hard at all to overcome. As far as the quality and taste. Compared to the regular tap the taste is 10 times better. Its hard to explain in words the absence of taste but it is not a bad thing at all. At this point the Dispenser has been in use in our home for a week and everyone loves the taste and ease of use. As for the cost. it was around $53 for the dispenser including delivery. We have been spending more than that on 5 gallon bottles each month so in one months use this product will pay for itself. you do have to purchase new filters about every 4-6 months and they range about $25 each but you can quickly recover the cost by not buying bottles in the future. All in all this is a great buy. Thanks for reading and I hope this helps

Unless or until we get a comparable water dispenser type filter tank I'm left basing my thoughts on out of box experience and comparisons to other filtration methods we have used. Here goes.The unit comes in about a half dozen pieces packaged in one box. The instructions are good, the assembly is not rocket scientry. There are, as others report, a couple of miseries. One is the nested nature of the tank upper and lower sections. The manufacturer does this for all the right reasons shippingwise and if the box hasn't been subjected to an inordinate amount of shake, rattle and roll aggravating how one piece settles into the other I expect that the contents would remain reasonably easy to separate for assembly. Alas, this is the real world. Expect the worst, hope for the best. It took me about as long to type this as it did to get the pieces unpacked but I do fiddly bits for a living so there's that. Still, I can see how with enough settling the two tank body components could challenge the end user to a death match.The other thing is the lid assembly which begs "break me, I'm a fragile polymer ring and I'm begging you to be just a little hamhanded so I can rain on your parade." Don't be hamhanded and you should be fine. Once assembled it's as rugged as any other oversized lid on a hinged ring... made of plastic.Here's an obvious tidbit. This Greenway system is not for use in coolers that store the bottle below. If you doubt that statement and go ahead and try, please post a video. This is a pretty dry topic but a vid of a bottom fed attempt would wet it up pretty good.My cooler is a floor standing Primo. There's umptyteen models of floorstanding Primos but they are probably all just about the same structurally. In my case, I had to remove the ring that provides the rest for store bought bottles and with the ring comes the spear tip that pierces the store bought bottle lid. YMMV but the ring/spear slides out with a little effort. I think that the absence of the ring makes the Greenway appear less stable than a store bought bottle is with the ring left in place. Fortunately since my wife and I tend not to engage in Greco Roman style wrestling in the kitchen much anymore the Greenway seems fine on its perch without said ring for support.The instructions include an appropriate warning about overfilling. It is not wasted words.The water quality is today with less than a months use registering 47 PPM from the Greenway, while my tap (city water) is measuring 58. I have seen the Greenway as low as 36 and we typically get the high thirties out of both a faucet PUR and a Britta box in the refrigerator. Subjectively the water from the Greenway tastes good, expectedly sweet and with enough mineralization to tell my taste buds this is not RODI. I am not impressed though with today's PPM reading compared to my other sources of filtered water. I do not have a regular testing regimen. I tested it when new and a couple of days later but not since until this review. Unexpected result and I guess that I will be more diligent and update.OTOH the Greenway is way more convenient than our other filtered sources. I get quite a bit of convenience from the cooler itself so it's fuzzy math carving out the Greenways contribution but suffice to say the Greenway is integral to having a 4 gallon reservoir of filtered water on hand that I don't have to shlep from the market or pay inflated prices to have filtered and delivered to me. That alone is a no brainer. My other filtered water options carry their own baggage, not the least of which is filter changes, committed refrigerator space, goofy wart on the end of our expensive kitchen faucet and so forth.The economics and ergonomics of the Greenway rate it a 4 on the Lee scale although it is really a 3.75 or thereabouts in lieu of the less than stellar filtering results.It is just so much better a solution feeding this thing one gallon jugs of tap water than it is storing and hoisting five gallon jugs of store bought water.Lastly, the Greenway is not the only game in town. It's kind of antiseptic looking and if your kitchen is anything other than "industrial chic" the Greenway will not augment your food prep gestalt. Having been through a few of the hand held plastic water dispenser types I would venture to guess that this thing will look pretty weathered in a couple, maybe three years. Since it's so prominent wherever it is due to it's size that means it either earns it's keep nicely on all fronts or by 2015 it gets replaced by a less Spartan looking competitor.Either way, the concept is outstanding and should be a wake up call to the ridiculously overhyped and overpriced bottled water industry.

I was so looking forward to using this instead of buying water dispenser bottles. I got it all assembled and the bottom piece that is supposed to go into the water cooler is way too big. They say this fits all Vitapur water dispensers. Well obviously all but the one vitapur i have! The bottom piece should be the same size as the neck of the water jug (2-1/4”). It’s not! It’s 3-3/16”. That’s like trying to fit a square plug in a round hole. It’s not rocket science! The manual says to remove the bottle support collar if it doesn’t fit. Well that leaves the water reservoir open to contaminates and the water dispenser doesn’t sit securely on the water cooler. The engineers who designed this shouldn’t even be designing a tinker toy!

Simple, with a long life filter and water tastes good. In less than a month filter jug thing has saved me having to pay for and mess around with at least 5 heavy bottles of water. This is the best $75.00 I have spent in years, I just think it is great. I rarely write reviews, but this thing is on point and deserves a high five.