On the topic of failures, broken, and poorly designed stuff.  I’ve had a PUR faucet mount filter for about 15 days under a year and it’s literally sprung a leak:

I’ve been watching with intrigue as it had more an more stress fractures over time.  I’m betting the pressure pulsations combined with the mix of plastics (white and the clear for the window) allowed some points of stress concentration along the window which led to the cracks propogating around the filter and ultimately a broken PUR water filter.  I was half hoping for a spectacular failure one of these days, but the filter has finally sprung a leak that sprays about 8 feet across my apartment.  I’m moving in a week or so and I’ll just buy a new one (which is conveniently cheaper than buying a new filter. . . what a scam).

UPDATE:

I’ve purchased a OmniFilter F1 Series A Faucet Filter hoping it would work better/as well as the PUR filter. This filter has a different designed filter housing (transparent and a single piece), and the filters are much much cheaper. These filters are available at Menards or Farm and Fleet (large hardware stores) along side the PUR and Brita filters.

Well, I purchased the filter on sale for ~$8 and hooked it up. . . and water just sprays everywhere. Right out of the box.

As you can see above, the filter leaks out of the knob, out of a small hole on the bottom where the housing halves meet and a dribble of water comes out of the actual water output.

So I e-mailed OmniFilter (I like to call companies, but sometimes I don’t have time and in this case there wasn’t much at stake) on June 30th and was replied back to on July 9th. Sure it’s fourth of July weekend/week but I can’t imagine that OmniFilter’s e-mail traffic is high enough to take over a week to get back to me.

It sounds like you have a defective filter. You can take it back to the place of purchase & exchange it out or warranty it though us. I would need a copy of the receipt along with your name, address & telephone number. You can fax the information to me at 866-227-6218. Once it is received we would replace it out for you.

No chance I’m going to be fighting the fax machine at work to get my $8 back, I’ll just try to swap it next time I’m at Menards and I’ll post if I have any better luck next time.

To OmniFilter’s credit, I have their much larger whole house filter on a project and it runs great, no leaks, filters are cheap and work great, hopefully this was an exception to their faucet filters 🙂

SECOND UPDATE:
I’ve exchanged my original bad OmniFilter for another. This one didn’t leak out the bottom, but instead had the filter shatter when water was ***slowly*** turned on for the first time. When I realized it broke I pulled the filter out and there was a chunk of o-ring in it that likely came from inside the filter. I’m going to pull it apart and post some pictures since my local Menards will no longer be stocking them (this was the last one and they’re marked down to $5).

FINAL UPDATE:
I carefully disassembled the filter, you can check out the results here. It basically comes down to the o-ring seats aren’t deep enough to let the o-rings properly sit in the filter – JUNK 🙁

Next up for consideration, I thought I’d try again this time with a Dupont “Premier Faucet Mount” Filter model number WF-FM100XW.

Initially this filter seemed promising, it included a 4 Phase filter (most are 2 or 3, likely means they added an extra layer of plastic mesh and called it a filter).  The cool thing was a good design!  They housed the filter as it’s own case inside the outer top screw on cover:

So I shouldn’t have the same failure as I did on the Pur filter where the housing fell apart.  Unfortunately on hooking this filter up the sink flow rate was sooo low it was unbearable, I expect the filtered water output to be slow, but the restriction from the filter on the sink was too much.  It would take several minutes to fill a pitcher of water, let alone fill the sink to do dishes in with unfiltered water.  Ultimately this filter was removed and set aside.  I pulled it apart but can’t see any obvious restrictions, try at your own risk!

I cut open the Dupont filter and I call BULLSHIT on their “quadruple filter”, have a look:

On cutting it open we find. . .

That’s right, the water goes in the middle and out the outside through the carbon cylinder, no magic and no “quadruple filter” to be found.  False advertising?