I first saw and tried the Berkey Water Filter System in 2017, and ever since I’d wanted one in my home. It took a while to get around to getting one. Mostly because it’s best to have a designated space to put the filter since it’s so big. We did not have room in our condo in SLC, and so when we moved into our rental house we finally purchased one.

About The Filter We Chose

We have the Royal size which is 3.25 gallons of water. We drink a lot of water in our house. We fill up the upper chamber each night and slowly work our way through the filtered water the following day. We use this glass pitcher to fill it up each evening when it’s empty. C and I each drink on average 100 ounces of water a day (a tip on this: you’ll drink more water if you have a large water bottle with a straw). We also use the water to make coffee, ice, cook, and our toddler is obviously drinking water all day too.

Needless to say, we were very excited about this purchase! But then, we started running into issues almost immediately. For starters, the set up process is lengthy. Make sure you carve out enough time to really read the directions and go through each step. Like… it’s a lot of steps.

Where We Ran Into Issues

Part of the set up is ‘priming’ the filters. Essentially it’s getting the two filters ready and able to filter the water. The instructions say to use a tool that they provide that connects the faucet into the opening of the filter. You are supposed to run the water for about two minutes, and then the filters should work. That was not the case for us. The water would drain through the filtration system pretty well for about a week, and then take days (yes, plural) to filter just over three gallons of water. We kept re-reading the directions and reviewing the steps to figure out what we were doing wrong, and couldn’t figure it out.

We were about to phone it in and give up on our filters and ask for new ones. We were certain the products we received were faulty and broken. Before doing that though, we decided to call their customer support system just to make sure we tried every single option available (even after reading online forums that told us everything we were doing was correct).

How We Fixed It

The customer service rep instructed us to soak the filters under water overnight for at least eight hours and up to 12 hours. Their website says to do this for 30-60 minutes. The rep told us if the filters were still not working, to give them a call back.

After we did this, of course, the filters started working and we haven’t had to prime them since. It was an extremely frustrating experience, though, as I wish it was written in bold letters on their website/instructions that you might have to soak the filters for up to 12 hours. Instead, we were left racking our brains trying to come up with a list of ideas that could be causing this (was our water that dirty? is our faucet broken and not correctly getting water into the filters?).

Finally In Love With The Berkey!

At the end of the day, I do love our water filter system. Thumbs up all around! The water tastes so clean and delicious. I drink so much more water now that we have this thing. And once it does work, it’s really amazing.