Frequently Asked Questions

Aurmina™ can treat virtually any freshwater source, including:

• Distilled water
• Reverse osmosis (RO) water
• Alkaline / ionized water
• Tap water
• Rainwater
• Rivers, lakes, and ponds

It is not suitable for treating saltwater.

How much you use depends on how contaminated the water is:

• Reverse osmosis or distilled water: ½ to 1 teaspoon per gallon.
• General sources (e.g. tap water): 1 to 2 teaspoons per gallon.
• Heavily contaminated water: a higher dose may be needed.

Reverse-osmosis and distilled water are extremely pure — but that purity comes at a cost. Stripping out everything removes not just contaminants but the natural minerals that give spring and mountain water their taste and character. What's left is clean, but flat and empty.

Adding Aurmina™ does two things:

• It returns a broad, balanced trace of natural minerals — which is what brings the taste and mouthfeel back, closer to water from a living spring.
• Its ionic minerals still run their clarification chemistry, binding any residual impurities and leaving the water fresh.

One practical tip: because RO and distilled water are so mineral-free, their pH can swing when Aurmina is added. Adding about 10% tap, well, or spring water before treating helps buffer that. Use the lower end of the dose (½–1 teaspoon per gallon) and a short 5–15 minute wait.

It depends on your household size and how much water you treat. For a household of two, one bottle should last at least six months.

Four simple steps:

• Stir or swirl so the Aurmina™ is evenly distributed.
• Leave the container uncovered so chlorine and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) can escape into the air (for tap and similar sources).
• Wait the recommended time: 5–15 minutes for RO or distilled water; 24–72 hours for tap and other sources. Don't refrigerate during treatment — cold slows the process.
• For tap, municipal, or well water, pour the clear water off the settled sediment (or filter it) before drinking. RO and distilled water are ready after the short wait.

The wait depends on your starting water:

• RO or distilled water: 5–15 minutes.
• Tap or other sources: 24–72 hours, to give the minerals time to bind and settle the contaminant load.

Store treated water in glass, stainless steel, ceramic, or BPA-free HDPE (#2) plastic to keep it fresh.

Yes. Heating treated water doesn't affect how well Aurmina™ works — it's fine to use for cooking or for making coffee, tea, or soup.

Yes — and sometimes it is telling you something worth knowing. Sediment is a readout of burden, not of potency: it shows what your water was carrying, not how well the minerals are working. How much you see, and how quickly, comes down to a few things:

• Source water: the less it is carrying to begin with, the less there is to settle out.
• Contaminant load: water carrying more dissolved material precipitates more, and more visibly.
• Type of contaminant: certain contaminants don’t reveal themselves visibly. Chlorine, for instance, largely leaves as a gas rather than settling out — so treat with the lid off and let it go.
• Temperature: warmer water settles faster; cold water slows everything down.
• Time: anywhere from a few hours up to about 72 hours for the floc to fully develop.

Distilled and reverse-osmosis water will not show you a burden, because there isn’t one. It was already stripped out — along with the minerals, which is the reason to add Aurmina to that water in the first place. Expect little or nothing to settle, and don’t read that as failure.

And some source water is genuinely clean. This is uncommon, but it is real: there are well waters and even some municipal supplies around the country that flocculate almost nothing. If that turns out to be yours, that is good news about your water — and you may need very little Aurmina, or none at all. Not everyone needs to treat their water, and we would rather tell you that than sell you a bottle you don’t need.

That sediment is your water’s burden, made visible. Every bit of it was dissolved or suspended in the water you were about to drink. The minerals bound it, gravity did the rest, and nothing went into the container but a teaspoon of mineral solution.

Most of what settles is mundane, and we are not going to tell you otherwise: clay, iron, ordinary mineral and organic matter, the unremarkable content of any water that has moved through soil and pipe. A small fraction of it is not mundane. That fraction is the residue of industrial and agricultural chemistry, the metals a distribution system sheds into what passes through it, and the byproducts of municipal treatment itself — and it is the reason anyone treats their water at all. Which is which, and in what proportion, depends entirely on where your water comes from. Supplies vary enormously, and some produce a great deal of sediment.

Here is the part worth sitting with. Two hundred years ago, water drawn from a spring or a well would still have left something in the bottom of that jar — clay, iron, organic matter off the rock and soil it had travelled through. What it would not have left is most of the rest of what is in there now. That difference is about two centuries old, it is not natural, and it is the whole reason this product exists.

On safety: don’t drink the sediment. Pour the clear water off the top, or run it through a coffee filter, cheesecloth or a gravity filter. The particles are bound and insoluble, so they stay on the bottom rather than going back into solution — which is exactly what makes decanting work.

And if you want to know what is actually in yours, it can be measured. Water-treatment residuals are analyzed routinely by standard environmental laboratory methods, and what settles in your container is no different.

The clumping or particulates you might see in the bottle are natural mineral precipitates. With this much dissolved mineral salt in solution, some can settle or re-form when the bottle goes through shifts in temperature, oxygen, or altitude during storage and shipping — much like the sediment that forms in a good unfiltered apple cider vinegar.

It's purely cosmetic and doesn't affect the product's safety, strength, or quality. If you'd rather not see it, strain the solution through a coffee filter, cheesecloth, or fine strainer — or just shake the bottle to redistribute it and use it as-is.

It is the iron — and it happens because there is nothing else in the water.

Aurmina™ carries iron in sulfate form, dissolved alongside the rest of its mineral load. In ordinary tap, well or spring water that iron stays in company: bicarbonate, sulfate, calcium, magnesium and dissolved organic matter surround it and keep it complexed and in solution.

Reverse-osmosis and distilled water have none of that. The iron arrives into water that is effectively empty, with nothing to pair with, and gives up an electron to the oxygen dissolved around it. Once oxidized it will not stay in solution — it drops out as hydrated iron oxide, the same chemistry as rust, and films onto glass as a faint yellow-brown residue.

It is harmless, and it does not affect the safety or quality of your water. A vinegar soak — plain, or mixed with water — lifts it in minutes.

Two ways to avoid it. Filter after treating, which catches the iron once it has come out of solution. Or add about ten percent tap, well or spring water before you treat — enough dissolved minerals to keep the iron in company, so it never gets the chance.

Aurmina™ is a concentrated solution of mineral salts drawn from volcanic biotite. Every element is in sulfate form, which is what lets it dissolve and carry a charge. By volume, it's roughly 97.5% purified water and 2.5% dissolved mineral salts — iron, sulfur, magnesium, potassium, and a broad spectrum of other elements in trace amounts.

Twenty-nine of those elements have been individually measured. How we arrive at that number — and what the source rock may hold beyond it — is the next question.

Twenty-nine elements have been individually quantified by accredited laboratories on certificates of analysis — twenty-five on the mother solution these products are diluted from, and four more resolved in the retail panel. Germanium, tungsten and molybdenum were tested and not detected, so they are excluded from the twenty-nine.

That is a floor rather than a ceiling, and the reason is the rock. Geological studies have documented more than forty distinct elements across biotite and closely related micas — a figure set by the limits of the instruments and by the panels investigators chose to run, not by what the mineral actually holds. In 2007, Eric Moeller, then president of The Vermiculite Association, put the potential inventory as high as eighty.

So there are three numbers, and they carry different weight: twenty-nine measured in our own material, more than forty documented in the literature, and as high as eighty as an expert assessment of the rock's capacity. Twenty-nine is what has been measured, and twenty-nine is what we claim.

Aurmina™ reduces a broad range of contaminants — over 245 have been tested, and likely more that haven't. Tested categories include:

• Heavy metals
• Pesticides & insecticides
• Herbicides
• Pharmaceuticals
• BPA & phthalates
• Disinfectants & disinfection byproducts
• Fluoride
• VOCs & semivolatile organic compounds
• PCBs, PAHs, and related compounds

See the full contaminant data →

Aurmina™ has been independently tested by third-party laboratories using recognized analytical methods, including EPA and NSF/ANSI test methods. Those tests measure how effectively it reduces contaminants — the same data behind the removal figures shown across this site. See the full contaminant data →: Adya Clarity Contaminant Reduction Tests Link, Purinize Contaminant Reduction Tests, Aurmina Hormone Reduction Tests

View the Certificate of Analysis→(opens in a new tab)

Yes. In independent challenge testing, Aurmina™ reduced fluoride by about 93.7% — from 7.94 mg/L down to below 0.5 mg/L. The fluoride binds to Aurmina's minerals and settles out with the rest of the contaminant load.

Through coagulation, flocculation and settling — the same sequence a municipal treatment plant runs, and the same one a volcanic spring runs on its own underground. The mechanism is electrical.

First, why contaminants stay suspended at all. Most of what is dispersed in water carries a net negative surface charge: clay colloids, humic and fulvic organic matter, oxide particles, microbes, and the trace metals that ride on them. Like charges repel, and each particle also holds a shell of ordered water around it that resists being pushed through. Between that electrostatic repulsion and that hydration barrier, particles which would otherwise collide and fall out instead stay apart indefinitely. Nothing is wrong with such water. It is stable — and the stability is the problem, because stable contamination is invisible contamination.

Coagulation: the charge is cancelled. Aurmina introduces multivalent cations in dissolved sulfate form, and they do two different jobs. Divalent calcium and magnesium raise the ionic strength of the water, which compresses the electrical double layer around each particle and lowers the barrier between neighbors. Trivalent aluminum and iron do something more direct: they are drawn onto the negatively charged surfaces and adsorb there, neutralizing the surface charge itself. The repulsion collapses.

The floc forms, and it has enormous surface area. Aluminum and iron do not remain as bare ions in water. They hydrolyze in steps as pH shifts, building polynuclear hydroxo and hydroxysulfate complexes and then amorphous hydroxide solids with very high surface area. That surface is what allows dissolved material to leave, not only suspended particles: humic and fulvic acids, phosphate, organic compounds and trace metals bind to the growing hydroxide, and the precipitate entrains what it meets on the way down.

Flocculation and settling. Destabilized particles can now approach one another, collide and stick. Microflocs grow into visible flocs, dense enough to leave suspension. Over the treatment period they collect on the bottom, and the water above them clears.

One thing worth reframing. The cloud that appears in the first hours is not your water getting dirty. Nothing went into it but a teaspoon of mineral solution — everything you see was already there, held invisible by the chemistry that kept it dispersed. What looks like the water dirtying itself is the opposite: it is shedding what stabilization chemistry had been hiding. Then you pour off the clear water, or filter it.

Most methods force a trade-off. Reverse osmosis and distillation strip water clean, but they strip it of everything — the minerals leave with the contaminants, and what remains is chemically inert. There is nothing left in it to give or take an electron, nothing available to exchange, nothing to buffer a shift in pH, and nothing dissolved for the water to organize itself around. Simple filters have the opposite problem: they keep the minerals in and miss much of the contaminant load.

Aurmina™ does both at once — it reduces over 245 tested contaminants (including fluoride, VOCs, and heavy metals) while leaving a broad, balanced trace of natural minerals in the water. Those minerals are what carries the four properties back: the water stays redox-active, it has ions available to exchange, it can buffer a shift in pH, and it forms hydration shells around what is dissolved in it. Take the minerals out and all four go with them; leave them in and all four stay. The result tastes clean and full rather than flat, closer to water that has come up through rock than water that has been through a membrane.

Those four properties are measurable, and stripped water measurably lacks them. What they amount to inside a body is a separate question, and one we treat as open.

There are two numbers, and the distance between them is the mechanism working.

Before the floc settles, in water dosed at the recommended rate of one teaspoon per gallon, independent analysis measured aluminum at less than 1 mg/L. After the floc settles — which is the water you actually drink — that same analysis found no detectable aluminum in two of the three samples, and 0.1 mg/L in the third.

That drop is the whole point. The aluminum binds contaminants and then leaves with them; what collects at the bottom of the container is aluminum carrying what it captured. What stays in the glass falls within the EPA’s secondary standard for aluminum, 0.05–0.2 mg/L.

What that standard is, and is not. The EPA figure is not a toxicity threshold, and it is worth knowing that before the number alarms anyone. Secondary standards are, in the EPA’s own words, “non-enforceable guidelines regulating contaminants that cause cosmetic or aesthetic effects” — for aluminum, that means cloudiness in the water and deposits in distribution pipes. The EPA has never set a primary, health-based limit for aluminum, because the evidence has not supported one. The World Health Organization has likewise set no formal guideline value, noting only that a health-based figure of roughly 0.9 mg/L could be derived from the tolerable intake — nine times what our highest sample measured.

The arithmetic, if you want it. EFSA and JECFA have set tolerable weekly intakes for aluminum from all sources combined: 1 and 2 mg per kilogram of body weight per week respectively, or roughly 10–20 mg a day for a 70 kg adult. At 0.1 mg/L you would have to drink 100 to 200 liters of treated water a day to reach that from water alone.

Three samples is a small set, and we would rather tell you the number than round it. Full lab results are available on request.

Aluminum is the most abundant metal in the Earth’s crust. You cannot draw a broad mineral extract out of volcanic rock and not get aluminum — it is one of the elements the rock is built from. So the honest answer to “why is it in there” begins with: because it is in the mountain.

But it earns its place. The aluminum is the coagulant: the part that does the cleaning.

In sulfate form, aluminum is the most widely used drinking-water coagulant in the world. Its trivalent charge gives it a strong affinity for negatively charged material — fine particles, organic matter, phosphates, trace metals — and as it binds them it builds floc heavy enough to fall out of suspension, taking what it caught down with it. Municipal plants have run on this chemistry for more than a century, and the practice is far older than that: accounts describe Egyptians clarifying water with alum-like coagulants as early as 1500 B.C. Iron does the same work alongside it, which is why both are in the bottle.

Nature does this without a treatment plant. In acidic, sulfate-rich volcanic and hydrothermal waters, aluminum and iron hydrolyze into hydroxysulfate and oxyhydroxide phases that behave like mineral nets — adsorbing organics, suspended particles, microbes and trace metals, then drawing them down toward the sediment. The striking clarity of many mountain springs is the record of that process having already happened underground. Aurmina runs the same chemistry in a glass, on your counter, in a day.

Few elements are feared as widely as aluminum, and few are encountered as constantly. It is the most abundant metal in the Earth’s crust and its third most abundant element after oxygen and silicon. Life developed in its presence from the beginning. You have eaten it every day you have been alive — in grains and bread, in vegetables, in tea and cocoa, in herbs and spices — and you have done so without incident.

The amounts are worth seeing next to each other, because they are not close.

A single square of chocolate carries more aluminum than a liter of your treated water. A muffin can carry more than two hundred liters of it. Nobody has ever been warned about the muffin.

And it is not a heavy metal. That term describes elements defined by high density and by toxicity at trace amounts — lead, mercury, cadmium. Aluminum is light, abundant and structural: it is one of the atoms that builds clays, micas, feldspars and zeolites, the layered mineral architecture that lets soil and water hold charge, exchange ions and clarify themselves.

What decides whether aluminum causes harm is the form it is in, the dose, and the route it takes. Metallic aluminum in cookware can leach into acidic or salty food under prolonged heat, sometimes delivering more than food and water combined. Aluminum injected into tissue bypasses the gut entirely, which is a different situation in every respect. Aluminum bound in a mineral lattice or complexed with silicate and sulfate behaves unlike either: it is poorly soluble and poorly absorbed. Estimates put intestinal absorption of aluminum near 0.1 percent, with the remainder passing through the bowel — though absorption does rise under more acidic conditions, which is worth saying rather than leaving out.

Aurmina’s aluminum is in that last category, in the same complexed mineral form found in natural mineral springs, volcanic waters, and clays such as bentonite and montmorillonite.

The hazard lives in the form.

Dietary figures: French Total Diet Study 2 (ANSES) and Hong Kong Centre for Food Safety Risk Assessment Study No. 35, Aluminium in Food. Serving estimates are calculated from the reported concentrations at a 100 g serving.

No, and the composition is the reason.

Of the twenty-nine measured elements in the bottle, only three sit at any meaningful concentration — sulfur, iron and aluminum. The rest are present in minute amounts, many of them below a milligram per liter. It was formulated for what these minerals do to water, which is a different problem from feeding a body.

Then it gets diluted. A teaspoon into a gallon is roughly one part in seven hundred and fifty, so what was already small in the bottle becomes very small in the glass. And two of those three principal elements, iron and aluminum, largely leave again with the floc — which is the entire point of adding it.

So treated water is nowhere near a mineral supplement, and we would not want you to use it as one. If you are trying to correct a deficiency, take something formulated and tested for that. Aurmina is a water treatment that happens to leave good minerals behind, not a source of nutrition.

No, and the reason is timing: the chemistry happens in the pitcher, not in you.

Coagulation, flocculation and settling are finished before you drink anything. By the time the water reaches your glass the reactive species have already combined with what they captured and left as floc, which you pour off or filter out. What you swallow is water carrying a trace of dissolved minerals — not a binding agent still looking for something to hold onto.

That is the difference between this and a chelator. A chelating drug is designed to enter the bloodstream and bind metals there, and its well-documented liability is that it carries essential minerals out along with the toxic ones. Aurmina is not a chelator, is not dosed as one, and has finished its work before it is ever consumed.

What treated water does once it is inside a body is a separate question, and not one a water-quality panel can answer. Research into it is underway. We will publish it once it has been through peer review, and not before.

Aurmina™ begins high in the mountains of Fukushima, Japan, as a volcanic mineral raw material — hydrobiotite and vermiculite, weathered forms of volcanic biotite. Those mineral tailings are treated with sulfuric acid to bring the ions into solution, and that concentrated mineral solution is shipped to the United States, where it's finished and bottled.

Aurmina™ doesn't expire. It's an entirely inorganic mineral solution — mineral salts dissolved in water, with nothing organic in it to break down, spoil, or lose potency. Kept capped at normal room temperature (just don't let it freeze), it stays effective indefinitely.

To return a product, follow these steps:

• Review our return policy (below) to make sure your item qualifies.
• Request a Return Authorization Number (RA#): email customerservice@aurmina.com to receive your RA#. This number is required for all returns and exchanges.
• Once you have your RA#, follow the instructions on the Aurmina™ Merchandise Return Form to package, label, and ship your return.

We accept returns of unopened, unused, or damaged-on-arrival products within 30 days of the shipment date. All returns must be approved in advance and require a Return Authorization Number (RA#).

We're sorry if your order hasn't arrived. If tracking shows your package as delivered but you can't find it, the carrier may have left it somewhere safe. Please check:

• Around your mailbox, porch, garage, and exterior doors — anywhere a package might be tucked out of sight.
• Your mailbox again — some packages arrive separately from your regular mail.
• With others in your household, or with neighbors who may have accepted it.

In rare cases, a package is marked "delivered" but takes another 24–72 hours to actually show up. If it's been more than 72 hours and you still don't have it, please file a Missing Package Claim with the carrier:

• USPS Missing Package Claim
• UPS Missing Package Claim

Aurmina™ isn't responsible for lost or stolen packages confirmed delivered to the address entered on the order. On request, we'll confirm the delivery address, delivery date, tracking, and carrier so you can investigate with them.

Most orders are processed and shipped within 24 hours, barring any issues like a missing address or incomplete shipping details. We ship daily, Monday through Friday. Orders placed after noon on Friday will ship first thing Monday morning.

Yes. International shipping options and rates are available at checkout. If we are unable to process your international order, contact us at customerservice@aurmina.com to request a shipping quote. Once the quote is confirmed, we'll send you an invoice for payment.

California and Iowa have their own registration and certification requirements for water treatment products sold in those states. In practice, any product that makes contaminant-reduction claims has to pass additional state-specific third-party certification — for example, through an organization like NSF — before it can be sold there.

Aurmina™ has already been independently tested by third-party laboratories, but that extra state certification is prohibitively expensive for a small business like ours. So, for now, we're unable to ship to customers in California or Iowa.

For more detail, see the California State Water Resources Control Board's guidance on residential water treatment devices.

Yes. Aurmina™ ships to every U.S. state except California and Iowa. We're committed to getting high-quality, independently tested water to as many people as we can.

We hope so. If California or Iowa update their rules to accommodate smaller businesses — or offer a more affordable certification path — we'll revisit it. In the meantime, we're focused on keeping Aurmina™ transparent, high-quality, and affordable for everyone we can reach.

If you're in California or Iowa and want access to Aurmina™, one of the most effective things you can do is let your state representatives know. Public demand is often what moves these rules — and helps make sure small businesses and new products aren't shut out of the market.