This Artfully Designed Water Filter Puts Your Brita to Shame

COVE IS A new water filtration system for your home. On its own, this statement is about as exciting as buying a new filter for your Brita. But Cove doesn’t want to be your new Brita. It doesn’t want to be your new Soma, either. Cove it wants to be the smarter, higher-tech version of all those it-works-but-it’s-not-great water gadgets you’ve picked up at Target. Really, what Cove wants is to to be the Nest of the water filtration world, and it has the price to prove it. At $250, it isn’t the cheapest water filtration system you can buy, but it does have some thoughtful design touches that begin to justify the price hike.

First and most obviously, Cove looks like it came off the line at an Apple factory.  Like Eero or Nest, it’s part of a new wave of traditionally lame home goods that are hoping good design will revolutionize their product category. With a matte aluminum exterior, Cove is a sturdy and sleek piece of kitchen hardware. Its heft is noticeable but not detrimental; the gadget is designed to be stationary. Unlike a Brita or Soma, which require you to stick the entire thing under the faucet to fill, Cove comes with a removable glass pail, not unlike what you’d find in a sandbox. It might sound like an insignificant detail, but its value is clear if you’ve ever tried to wrestle a Brita into your sink or worried about your contoured-glass Soma slipping through your wet hands.

COVE                   

The filter is equally as easy to change (every four to six months for around $15), requiring you to simply insert it in the back of the Cove like you might a USB into its port. This simplicity is a boon to cleanliness. Any time you touch your filter or its accompanying receptacle—surprise!—you leave behind bacteria. “When you reach inside your filter jug that’s really unhygienic,” says Alex Totterman, one of Cove’s co-founders. “A lot of times you can really add a lot of bacteria just by doing that.” Cove, Totterman explains, was designed to minimize your contact with the water inside.

After filling the pail, your tap water passes through the first step of a dual-stage filtration process, which means your water is filtered twice before you drink it. Cove claims this is what makes its product more effective than the carbon-based filters its competitors use (the product is undergoing independent testing right now). The oblong filter, which the water passes through en route from the pail, is made of a strata of silver-impregnated carbon, activated alumina, an ion exchange, and mineral stones. The water passes through these materials sequentially: the self-cleaning carbon gives water its first round of purification, the activated alumina removes fluoride, the ion exchange absorbs heavy metals and pharmaceuticals, and the mineral stones add healthy minerals into over-stripped water. “There are so many different substances in our water, there’s not one way to remove everything,” Totterman explains. “That’s why you need so many different stages.”

The water from the pail ends up in a glass vessel at the base of Cove, where it sits until you want to pour it into a glass. To make that happen, you swipe a sensor at the top of the device and a water pump pulls the H2O back through the filter, this time via a route made from silver-coated membranes a micron in diameter, which acts like a sieve, ultimately removing the last of the impurities that couldn’t be absorbed by the first filtration process.

Cove has clever technological features that make it particularly user-friendly. An illuminated band hides the electronic components and serves as the main user interface. It glows and pulses while your water is being processed and alerts you to when you need to refill it. A peltier cooler at the bottom of the device cools your water while structural vents drive hot air upwards and away from your tank of water. You can connect Cove to your smartphone to get alerts, and its touch sensors can interpret how fast you want your water to flow into your cup. Neat but not totally necessary stuff.

What makes Cove interesting, beyond its claim to cleaner water, is what it might be capable of in the future. The team has eventual plans to build sensors that can monitor water levels, usage data, and further down the line the ability collect data on what’s reallyin your water. “In the same way people look at the ingredients in their food, we want people to consider what they’re drinking,” Totterman says. Which means that instead of water filters asking us to blindly accept that they’re doing their job, someday they might help us hold them accountable.