A recent search of the internet tells me that the electric water ionizer companies and dealers still don’t get it. Electric water ionizer sites continue to spread misleading information in an effort to support their sales. One site I checked out inspired the content and title of this article. Here is the link http://alkalinewater.com/non-electric-water-ionizers/

The above website is run by someone with obvious ties to an electric water ionizer company. The website advertises a number of fake review sites to bash the competition and to promote their own line of electric water ionizers. The site also advertises the opportunity to “Get In on the Billion Dollar Water Ionizer Industry” by becoming a dealer of their company.

What a load of garbage.

Anyone that does their research knows that the review sites that are being advertised are phony. If the water ionizer industry ever achieves annual sales of a billion dollars, it will be the result of the public becoming aware of how and why the machines work and therefore, why they are important. Sales figures of a billion dollars per year will also depend upon the machines being affordable to the average family. To date, only the non-electric/anti-oxidant water ionizer companies are addressing the educational aspect or the affordability issue.

To date, the electric water ionizer companies continue to produce phony review sites and now, misleading articles like the one in the link above. The article if full of misleading information. Was the misleading information intentional like so many other efforts in the past, or was the author simply ignorant of the facts? I will give the author the benefit of the doubt and chalk up the misleading article to a lack of research. It is much easier to continue forward in one’s thinking, even if it is wrong, than to question ingrained doctrines and spend hundreds of hours researching.

In the article, the author informs reader that antioxidant filters/non-electric water ionizers don’t produce antioxidants:

These types of alkaline water will have a pH of 8.5 to 9.5 created by adding alkaline minerals to the water. What they don’t offer are the antioxidant properties found in alkaline ionized water, which is produced through the process of electrolysis.

Wrong! I have to question whether the author knows what antioxidants are, or how or why they work. Antioxidants are energy donating ionic charges associated with atoms or molecules which combine with and diffuse harmful energy stealing oxidants such as free oxygen inside your body.

Electrolysis can assist in the creation of antioxidants by concentrating the alkali minerals in the source water at the anode of an ionization chamber. It is the process of the water molecules reacting to energy donating alkali minerals that causes the surplus of hydroxyl ions versus hydrogen ions that provide dramatic temporary changes in the pH and ORP levels when water is subjected to electrolysis. While pH and ORP are easy to measure, it is the availability of the free hydrogen created by the presence of alkali minerals in the ionized water that provides both energy and the beneficial antioxidant ions.

Ionization creates antioxidants because the attraction of the oxygen atom in a water molecule to magnesium or other alkali metal is stronger than the attraction to hydrogen. The resulting “cast off” free hydrogen is a building block to human health and survival. You don’t need electrolysis to create ionization. In fact, the scientific community views electrolysis as “electrocuting” the water which erases the valuable memory in water. I will leave that subject for another day.

Related posts:

1. How Antioxidant Filters Ionize Water Without Electricity
2. Better Water For Less
3. Drink Your Bubbles

This site is all about providing information, so I don’t get involved in touting or bashing companies or brands.

Let me begin by saying that the Enagic Multi Level Marketing company has done an admirable job of creating interest in ionized water during the past three years, and that is a good thing in my books.

Enagic has a good machine.  Enagic purchased the rights to a line of ionizers produced by the well respected Toyo corporation, and began marketing in September 2004.

However, I’m not a fan of MLM in the water ionizer industry for two main reasons.

The first reason involves the price/value equation. The Enagic SD501 sells for just under $4,000, which is approximately twice as much as the other leading ionizers available on the market.  When asked about why their machines are double the price of everyone else’s machines, typical responses include: our machines are the best, OR, our machines are made in Japan which makes them better, OR, our machines have big plates, OR, our machines have alot of power, yada-yada-yada. But, you will never hear an Enagic dealer talk about how the price got to be $4,000 at a demonstration, but if you appear interested, you will hear about the “business opportunity” available to anyone that purchases their product.

Maybe it is just me, but when my wife and I were trying to decide which ionizer to purchase, I wasn’t happy to learn that there were eight levels of sales commissions being paid on the unit that we were looking at.

A quick survey of the market showed us that other leading brands were also producing great products that performed as well or better that the MLM product.  Further research and testing proved to us beyond a doubt that the industry had advanced beyond the technology offered by the MLM product, and that others provided significantly better value.   Needless to say, we didn’t purchase an ionizer from Enagic.

The second, and more important concern that I have about the about the MLM system in the water ionizer industry is that there is a wide discrepancy in the knowledge levels of the dealers. While water is very simple, it is also very complicated at a deeper level. Every Enagic dealer I have spoken to has had good intentions, but many, especially the new people are simply not well trained. A lack of training or experience can lead to false claims being made, or incorrect information being spread about other products. People that have just paid $4,000 for their machine are often enticed by the potential to earn the money back that they spent.  They are encouraged to contact their friends and family to buy a machine despite the fact that they have little or no knowledge of how or why the machines work.  Their passion is a good thing, but their lack of knowledge can be downright scary.   Water effects everybody in so many ways.  It only makes sense that someone should learn as much as they can about a topic that is so important before they start imposing their will on others.

The gentleman that introduced my wife and I to their MLM product was very knowledgeable.  He was a real pro in every way, other than what we thought his disparaging remarks about competitive machines didn’t make sense when we did our homework. I don’t know about you, but hearing someone talk badly about competitive products really turned us off.  In fact, the negative stuff acted as a springboard for us to start researching other companies in the industry in much greater depth.  If I was selling a great product, I would just focus on my product and people would see my passion.

Related posts:

1. Marketing hype in the water ionizer industry
2. Beating arthritis with ionized water or alkaline diet!

It drives me crazy when I review water ionizer websites that claim that their machines are far superior to their competitor’s machines. They also seem to revel in bashing the competition. Why would anyone want to do this? All it does is confuse potential buyers and make the company look really stupid. The pharmaceutical industry must just be sitting back and chuckling at the ridiculous behavior of the participants in the water ionizer industry.

Bashing other companies or products in order to make your product look good by comparison is pathetic. The public is looking for information and the truth, not a sales pitch. Can you imagine GM using its marketing dollars to tell people not to buy a Ford or Chrysler because they make lousy cars? I think it was about 15 to 20 years ago that Coke and Pepsi went through a short period of bashing each other. The strategy turned the public off and people started looking to alternatives. The management teams at both Coke and Pepsi figured out very quickly that people don’t like that type of approach. I hope that the water ionizer companies learn the lesson quickly, so that they can start to focus on the important issues. I believe that everyone in the health care industry should be morally obligated to become as well informed as possible, as customers are putting their trust in their hands.

Now it’s time to take an honest look at what it takes to produce the best results from a water ionizer machine. I will start by saying that you can ignore most of the marketing hype that you see on the internet. While some sites provide excellent information, most focus their efforts on selling you their product. Marketing people emphasize the virtues of the products, and minimize the factors that are lacking in their machines.

Despite all the flashy proclamations on the internet, there are two key elements to producing the best results for ionized water. Marketing companies illustrate other virtues, but they are secondary factors in producing good results. The primary factors are:

1) The amount of electrolysis that actually occurs in the ionizing chamber of a water ionizer.
2) Dealing with the factors presented by the source water.

Dealing with issue number one (the time that water is exposed to the ionizer plates) is easy. It is simple physics to understand that the more electrolysis that takes place, the better the results in terms of producing pH and ORP. So, how do the machines achieve maximum electrolysis? The ionizer companies go on and on about the plate size, the material the plates are made of, solid plates vs. mesh plates vs. slotted plates, and power. The simple fact is that the more exposure to the surface area of the plates, the more electrolysis takes place.

More surface area can be achieved in three ways… more plates, bigger plates, and introducing slots in the plates. More plates cost more and therefore push the price up. Bigger plates make the machines bigger and therefore make the appearance of the machine on your counter more conspicuous. Slotted plates add 25% more surface area (according to the physicists) without changing the size or number of the plates. So, it seems that slotted plates are a “no-brainer” as it doesn’t affect cost or size. You will see the companies that don’t have slotted plates present an argument about clogging, but it is nonsense. Putting slots in plates is a positive thing and it doesn’t increase the cost, so all the companies should be doing it. In every case, if you slow the flow of the water flow over the plates down, the results will improve, because more contact with the plates means more electrolysis. The review sites use water flow rates as one of the tricks to make their machines look like they produce the best results.

The manufacturers have been engaging in a battle of the number of plates for the past year. I believe that the primary reason for this strategy has been to combat the claims of one of the Multi Level Marketing companies that their machine was better because it had more plates. It is obvious that more plates are better, but how much is enough? I personally wasn’t convinced that moving from 5 plates to 7 plates would actually make a significant difference in performance, as I assumed it was just more marketing hype that would allow companies to raise their prices. However, when testing 5 plate versus 7 plate machines, the 7 plate machines do in fact produce better results under soft water or hard water conditions. If your source water is ideal (pH level of 7.1 to 7.3 and moderate hardness 80 to 140 parts per million), then you can achieve reasonably good results with a 5 plate machine.

Choosing a machine for its plate size becomes a personal issue. Bigger plates are better, but it makes the units bigger and more cumbersome. A bigger unit on the counter bothers some people, but not others. If a machine has small plates, the shortfall can be overcome somewhat by a machine that has more power. Personally, I can’t wait until the industry provides a wide array of under the counter “UTC” units that are priced more reasonably than what is available at this time. UTC units will allow for outstanding output from machines without worrying about the size, because the machine will be hidden away.

Now we need to deal with the more tricky factors, the source water. Canada and the USA have many different source water issues. We have to deal with great variations in the amount of hardness in the water, and we also have to deal with other water issues such as impurities. In cities, most people have to deal with chlorine and fluoride, which are negative factors, as well as concerns about the contents of older pipes. Rural areas don’t have to deal with chlorine and fluoride, but they typically have to deal with sediment in the water, and sometimes nasty things like nitrates (on farms) or heavy metals.

Unfortunately, the water ionizer companies have basically ignored the various issues and focused on selling their units. It is a typical case of greed, where profits are more important than safety. I believe that they can do a much better job. The only issue that the companies have addressed at all is the issue of soft water. Soft water is a problem for water ionizers because soft water contains very few minerals, and the ionizer requires minerals to work.

There are two different strategies that the various companies have chosen to deal with soft water. The old fashioned way to deal with a shortage of minerals in the water is with a calcium port, and the two oldest ionizer companies use this method. Companies that use this system have their customers purchase calcium and inject it into the machine. This system is effective, but I personally don’t care for it, because the amounts injected are not metered out in any systematic and accountable way, and the cost is both high and unnecessary. In my opinion, the better way to deal with soft water is to use filters that slowly introduce minerals into the water as the water moves through the filters. This system makes a lot more sense on an intuitive level, and there are no additional costs. While I would like to say that the manufacturers have perfected this system, it appears that they still have some work to do. Fortunately, one company in particular seems to be getting much better results than others when it comes to dealing with soft water, so it is just a matter of time until the competitors make the adjustment.

When it comes to the nasty things that we find in the water, I find that the manufacturers just don’t seem to care. Maybe they do care, but they certainly haven’t done anything about it yet. I think they can do a much better job. To that end, I have been doing some research with manufacturers of purification systems that could be used in combination with the water ionizer systems. I don’t have anything definitive yet, but the prospects are promising. I believe that we should be able to combine the positive aspects of the purification properties of reverse osmosis systems with the healthy contributions made by water ionizers. There are some logistical problems that we are working on, but I think a cost effective solution is possible. I will keep you posted as things develop.

This is totally off topic, but I thought it was funny. I was talking to a lady the other day about her new water ionizer, and I asked how she liked it. She said that she enjoyed the taste of the water, and that she had more energy, but what really impressed her was that her cat wouldn’t drink regular water anymore. It reminded me of a message on a magnet that my Mom used to have on her fridge. The message said “The more I get to know people, the more I like my cat”.

© This Alkaline Ionized Water article was posted on Waterfy

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