What the MICROMAX 6500 Does for Your Kitchen
This is the model for the household that wants to install something once and think about it as little as possible. Five stages instead of four, arranged so no single cartridge is doing two jobs at the same time. The result is longer filter life and fewer visits from anybody, including us.
It delivers to a dedicated faucet at your sink, so the water you drink, brew coffee with, freeze into ice, and cook with all comes from the same finished supply. The rest of the house keeps running on city water.
"I steer people to the 6500 when they tell me they hate maintenance. Splitting the sediment filter off the carbon is not a marketing stage, it changes how long the carbon lasts. The carbon stops getting clogged with grit it was never meant to catch, so it spends its whole life doing the one thing you bought it for."
Gregg Stewart, Owner, Puronics of Orange County, CA C-55 #904801, (714) 545-3022
The Five Stages, and Why There Are Five
The extra stage is at the front. On a four stage system, one cartridge handles both sediment and chlorine. Here those are two separate jobs done by two separate filters, and everything downstream benefits.
- Stage one, mechanical filtration. A 5 micron graded density filter that protects the entire system from dirt, rust, and sediment as small as two ten thousandths of an inch.
- Stage two, prolonged contact carbon. Water moves slowly through high capacity porous carbon so it gets maximum contact time, which is what makes dechlorination thorough rather than partial.
- Stage three, ultrafiltration. Fine enough to act as a barrier to waterborne cysts like Cryptosporidium and Giardia if they are present, and it reduces particulate down to a ten thousandth of a micron. It cleans itself.
- Stage four, reverse osmosis. A FilmTec thin film composite membrane reduces the majority of dissolved solids such as sodium, selenium and arsenic, metals including lead, copper, cadmium and chromium, and the majority of radioactive material such as barium and radium 226 and 228, where present. Rejected material flushes to the drain and the finished water is held in a sealed, sanitized tank.
- Stage five, carbon block. A final high grade carbon block strips remaining taste and odor and reduces volatile organic compounds on the way to the faucet.
MICROMAX 6500 vs the 7000
They make similar water. The real differences are stage count, cabinet space, and how often you touch it. The MICROMAX 7000 under sink system is the low profile four stage unit and it wins on fit, which is why it goes into most tight Orange County cabinets. The 6500 wins on service interval and on the radium and barium reduction, and it asks for a bit more room in return.
Neither is an upgrade over the other in some absolute sense. If your cabinet is crowded, the choice has already been made for you. If it is not, the water test tells us whether your dissolved solids reading justifies the fifth stage.
What It Costs and What Moves the Number
We quote after the test, not from a price list, because the install varies more than the equipment does. A counter that already has a fourth hole for the dedicated faucet costs less than one that needs drilling. Running a line to the refrigerator ice maker adds to it. Adding the Pur Alkaline mineral filter at the end adds a stage. Book the free in-home water test and the quote follows the reading.
Which Households the MICROMAX 6500 Fits
Families that use a lot of water at the kitchen sink, anyone whose test comes back with a high dissolved solids load, households on a well, and people who would rather not think about filters. Where it is the wrong call: a small condo kitchen with no cabinet room, where the 7000 is the answer, and a budget conscious household with unremarkable water, where the MICROMAX 6000 drinking water system does the same core job for less.
None of these fix hard water at the shower or the water heater. That is a separate machine on a separate part of the plumbing, covered on the Puronics water softener line page. See all three drinking systems side by side under under sink drinking water systems, or call Puronics of Orange County and start with the test.
