Michael Reynolds 
Short answer: yes, salt-free conditioners work, but they are not softeners. A salt-free system does not pull calcium and magnesium out of your water. It holds those minerals in a form that stays suspended and drains away, so scale stops forming on the inside of pipes and heat exchangers. What you get is scale control, … Read more
A shower filter for hard water reduces chlorine, chloramine, heavy metals and the sticky feeling of dissolved minerals on your skin, but it does not soften your water. That distinction matters more than any brand name, and most listings bury it. Our team compared 12 of the highest-reviewed shower head filters for hard water, weighed … Read more
Yes, shower filters remove chlorine, but only the media inside them does the work and the media type matters more than the stage count on the box. Chlorine is a gas dissolved in water, and a shower filter strips it out chemically rather than by straining it, so a mesh screen alone changes nothing about … Read more
If your kitchen faucet has a threaded aerator on the end of the spout, a faucet water filter will screw right on in about a minute and give you filtered water from the tap you already use. If it has a pull-down or pull-out sprayer head, no faucet mount filter will ever fit, and that … Read more
If your hair feels straw-textured, brittle or coated the moment you step out of the shower, the water is a fair place to point the finger. The best shower filters for dry hair do not soften your water, and they do not need to. They strip out the chlorine and chloramine that oxidatively eat away … Read more
In a blackout or a hurricane aftermath, the taps stop and the power goes out, so anything that needs electricity is a dead weight. A gravity water filter needs none of that. You pour untreated water into an upper chamber, gravity pulls it down through filter media, and clean water collects in a lower reservoir … Read more
Private well water is the one drinking water supply in the United States that no federal regulator tests for you. Because wells fall outside the Safe Drinking Water Act, the owner carries the whole job, and the only way to know what is coming out of the tap is to test it. We spent weeks … Read more
Choosing the best podcast microphones for beginners comes down to one question most buyers never ask: how noisy is the room you will record in? A dynamic microphone that ignores your laptop fan, keyboard and street noise will beat an expensive condenser every time, while a treated closet rewards a detailed condenser. Get that wrong … Read more
Most podcasters record in a spare bedroom, a closet, or a corner of a flat with a fridge humming behind the host. That is exactly the situation a dynamic microphone was built for, and it is why the best dynamic microphones for podcasting have become the default recommendation for anyone starting out. Our team compared … Read more
Recording a podcast used to mean an audio interface, an XLR cable, a boom arm, and a preamp you had to learn how to gain stage. A USB podcast microphone collapses that chain into one cable: the capsule, the preamp, and the analog-to-digital converter all live inside the body, and the computer treats it as … Read more