I Swapped My Berkey for the Rorra Countertop System
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I’d had my countertopwater filter— a favorite of doomsday preppers and Strategist staff alike — for years when I came to a decision: I needed to break up with Big Berkey.
While I actually have no problem with NYC’s finest tap, the big gravity-fedfiltersat on my counter for years, a shining stainless-steel monument to my lack of confidence in my building’s crumbling pipes. Was this fear totally baseless? Possibly. But the Berkey made me feel better. The brand’s signature black-carbon filters promised to filter everything — lead, chlorine, and PFAS (a.k.a. “forever chemicals”). Berkey was so effective it could even filter out pathogens like bacteria.
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But back in 2023, the company got into a lawsuit with the EPA, which issued a stop-sale notice on said filters. Basically, the EPA felt that the company couldn’t make antimicrobial claims. For a while it was hard to get any filters at all for it. Now, while the brand battles it out in court, you can buy different filters from a Berkey-approved company, but by the time all of this got sorted out I had gotten sick of using it altogether. Changing the filters when they needed to be replaced was also a chore. I slacked on filter maintenance and the Berkey sat, taking up valuable counter space, collecting dust.
Then I got a sample of the new filter on the block, the Rorra Countertop System. Like the Berkey, it’s a gravity-fed filter but the filters don’t need to be primed, which makes setup a breeze. You only need to pop the filter into place, just like changing the filter on ashowerhead. I put the entire thing together in less than ten minutes. The longest part of the whole process was waiting for the water to filter through (and this, too, happened much faster than it ever did with the Berkey — the flow rate is about two gallons per hour).
The Rorra also has some extra-nice design features like sensors that indicate when it’s time to change the filter (roughly once every three months) and when your water level has gotten low. The bottom tank stores 1.5 gallons of filtered water, while the top tank holds a gallon in reserve. The light will make sure the top tank never dips too low so you always have drinking water on hand.I also like the rounded edges and the sleek tap dispenser. And once you take it off the countertop base, it can be stored in the fridge if you, like me, prefer cold water, which is something I could never dream of doing with the Berkey.
Will the Rorra please the preppers? Probably not. But for my purposes, it’s perfect.
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