What it does: treats the water at your kitchen tap, delivered through a dedicated drinking-water faucet.
Cahaba Pure 50 is our best-value drinking-water system: a compact reverse-osmosis system with a traditional storage tank, quick-change service design and strong third-party certification. A licensed Alabama plumbing contractor fits it under your kitchen sink in a single visit.
IAPMO R&T certifies this configuration to NSF/ANSI 58 and CSA B483.1, including PFOA and PFOS reduction.
View complete certification detailsUnder-sink, single visit. Your price is confirmed in writing before anything is scheduled.
Reverse osmosis at the kitchen tap is the treatment that answers the musty, earthy taste Birmingham reported in 2024.
In May 2024, homes in Homewood, Vestavia Hills, Mountain Brook and North Hoover reported a musty, earthy taste. Central Alabama Water (formerly Birmingham Water Works) named the cause: geosmin, a natural compound produced by algae in the reservoirs this city draws from. It is harmless, and it comes and goes with the seasons, because our water comes from rivers and lakes.
A whole-home carbon filter reduces geosmin in part, at full household flow. Reverse osmosis at the tap is what answers it reliably, at the one faucet where taste matters most. That is why most Birmingham homes start here, and why we lead with it.
Send a photo. Get a firm price. Book the install.
Your address, and a photo under your kitchen sink. That tells us whether anything about your setup changes the price, and we find that out before we schedule.
$995 covers a standard install and is subject only to unusual site conditions confirmed before scheduling. We put your number in writing.
A licensed Alabama plumbing contractor fits it, tests it, flushes and sanitizes the system, then shows you how to change the cartridges.
The number you read here is the number on the invoice. Much of this industry prices at the kitchen table, where the figure moves with the evening. We publish ours and confirm it in writing, so your price is settled before a van is booked.
All four treat drinking water at the tap. What changes is the hardware, the gallons per day, and the paperwork behind each one.
The whole range is published here, at the same installed prices you would be quoted on the phone, and each certification line is quoted from the paperwork we hold for that one system. Essential is the name of this rung: premium reverse-osmosis drinking water at our lowest installed price, and our best-value system.
Certified protection, at our best value.
For homes that mainly want better drinking water. Normal household demand, and feed pressure that is already fine. Four-stage, nominal 50 GPD, traditional storage tank.
IAPMO R&T certifies this configuration to NSF/ANSI 58 and CSA B483.1, including PFOA and PFOS reduction.
More production, with a built-in booster pump.
Choose it for higher daily output, or where feed pressure wants support. Five-stage, nominal 75 GPD, integrated booster pump, NSF-certified 3.0-gallon tank. The pump is the hardware step up from the Pure 50.
The manufacturer identifies the membrane and the storage tank as NSF certified, not the complete system.
Our premium traditional-tank RO system.
Choose it for the top traditional RO platform Cahaba offers. It is also nominal 75 GPD and also carries a booster pump, so the difference is the build rather than the rate.
The storage tank is identified as NSF certified, not the complete system.
A premium alternative, and a different shape of answer. High-output RO with no storage tank, at a nominal 800 GPD rate. Choose Slim 800 for cabinet space and direct-flow performance. It sits alongside the ladder rather than on top of it. See Slim 800.
What moving up the range buys you is production and hardware. Higher GPD is a rate of production, and a stage count tells you how many housings sit in the row. Each system carries its own certification wording, quoted from the paperwork we hold for that system.
What you want treated, and how much water you use, are two different questions.
This is the rule the whole Cahaba range is built on. It holds at the kitchen tap just as it holds for the house. What do you want treated and how much water do you need are two questions with two different answers.
On the drinking-water range, this is the platform you pick. Each one carries its own certification statement, quoted word for word from the documentation we hold for that system.
This is production. Nominal GPD is how many gallons a day the system can make. The other half is whether the water pressure feeding it wants support. Both are questions about your plumbing rather than your water, and for a lot of Birmingham homes the smaller number is plenty.
Each answer stands on its own. A busy household that mainly cares about taste is well served by the smallest claim set and the larger production. A quiet household with one specific question may want a different platform at the smaller output. Whole-home systems split the same way: treatment level and system size are picked separately there too, each from its own measurement. See how the whole-home range is laid out.
The full listing, the substances it names, and the specification of the equipment we install.
This is the evidence behind the sentence at the top of the page. It is quoted from the manufacturer's performance data sheet, and we hand you that data sheet so you can look the certification up yourself.
IAPMO R&T certifies this configuration to NSF/ANSI 58 and CSA B483.1, including PFOA and PFOS reduction. Quoted from the manufacturer's performance data sheet, which names this exact configuration by its model number: "[model] system certified by IAPMO R&T to NSF/ANSI 58 and CSA B483.1 for the reduction of the following substances, as verified and substantiated by test data." We hand you the data sheet, model number and all, so you can look the certification up yourself
The listed substances are named. Barium, cadmium, copper, fluoride, hexavalent chromium, lead, pentavalent arsenic, radium 226/228, selenium, total dissolved solids, trivalent chromium, turbidity, and PFOA/PFOS
On PFOA and PFOS the data sheet publishes figures. Against a challenge concentration of 0.0015 mg/L, minimum reduction 98.77% and average reduction 99.26%
Scope of the listing. It covers the substances named above, as tested. PFOA and PFOS are two specific compounds within the wider PFAS family, and microplastics appear in no listing we hold. Each Cahaba system carries the certification wording of its own paperwork, which is why the sentence above belongs to this configuration alone
Chlorine at every tap, hard water, UV — we size all of it to your home's measured flow and your own water. Plenty of people start here and find this is all they need.
We confirm your price and book the install — usually the same day you ask.
Cahaba Water Co.