ZeroWater Filter vs Reign Energy Drink: Can It Really Get Back to Zero?

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ZeroWater built its entire pitch around one number. Every pitcher ships with a little TDS meter, and the promise is that whatever your tap water reads going in, it reads 000 coming out. That is a satisfying claim, and it is also the kind of claim that makes me want to do something stupid to it.

So I did. I poured a Reign energy drink into a ZeroWater filter to see what would happen. Before it went in, I put the ZeroWater meter in the Reign and it read over 800. The question was simple: can a filter designed for tap water take an 800 down to a 0?

Table of Contents

The Setup

Nothing complicated here. One can of Reign, one ZeroWater pitcher with a fresh-ish filter, and the TDS meter that comes in the box. Measure the Reign, pour it through, measure what comes out the other side. Five minutes of my life that I do not regret even slightly.

For a baseline: most tap water in the US reads somewhere between about 50 and 300 on that meter depending on where you live. Mine is nowhere near 800. Reign was in a completely different weight class before we started.

What That TDS Number Actually Measures

This is the part most people skip, and it matters. TDS stands for total dissolved solids. The meter is not testing for contaminants, safety, or taste — it is measuring electrical conductivity and converting that into a number that estimates how much dissolved material is floating around in the liquid.

Dissolved minerals raise it. So do salts, sugars, and every other soluble thing in a can of energy drink. A high TDS reading does not automatically mean water is unsafe, and a 000 reading does not automatically mean it is pure. It is a useful number, but ZeroWater markets it like it is a purity score, and it is not quite that.

Why 800 Is Such a Big Number

An energy drink is basically a delivery system for dissolved solids. Sweeteners, citric acid, sodium, caffeine, B vitamins, taurine, coloring — all of it dissolved into water. Of course it reads 800. It would be strange if it did not.

That is what makes this a genuinely absurd test. I was not asking the filter to clean up slightly hard tap water. I was asking it to reverse an entire beverage.

How ZeroWater Works vs. Brita and PUR

This is where ZeroWater actually is different from the competition, and it is worth understanding before you judge the result.

  • Brita and PUR use activated carbon, which is excellent at improving taste and odor and grabbing chlorine, but it does not pull out most dissolved minerals. Your TDS number barely moves.
  • ZeroWater adds an ion exchange resin stage on top of the carbon. That resin swaps dissolved ions out of the water, which is why it can actually drive the TDS reading down to zero on normal tap water.
  • The tradeoff is speed and lifespan. ZeroWater filters slowly, and the resin has a finite capacity — the more dissolved solids you push through it, the faster it is used up.

That last point is the whole reason this test is interesting. A resin with finite capacity, meet a liquid with 800 TDS.

The Result

I am going to make you watch the video for the actual number, because watching the meter get dunked into whatever came out the bottom is genuinely the best part and I do not want to spoil it in a paragraph.

What I will tell you is what to watch for: the color, how long it takes to drip through compared to normal water, and what the meter says at the end. Those three things together tell you more about how this filter works than any spec sheet on the box.

Please Do Not Do This to Your Filter

Obvious disclaimer, but I will say it anyway. Do not pour energy drinks, soda, juice, or anything other than water through a water filter you plan to keep using. You will destroy the cartridge, and those cartridges are the expensive part of owning one of these pitchers.

This was a sacrificial filter for a dumb experiment, which is roughly the job description around here. Yours should stay on tap water.

What This Says About the Filter

Stress tests are useful even when they are ridiculous, because they show you where a product stops working. A filter that handles a 250 TDS tap water beautifully and folds against an 800 TDS energy drink is not a bad filter — it is a filter being used a thousand percent outside its design envelope.

The practical takeaway for real life: if you live somewhere with genuinely hard, high-TDS water, ZeroWater will move that number in a way carbon-only pitchers will not. But your filter life is going to be short, and you should budget for cartridges accordingly.

Should You Buy a ZeroWater?

My honest read, having used one for a while: buy it if your tap water tastes bad and you want the biggest possible improvement, and if you are okay with replacing cartridges more often than a Brita. Skip it if your water is already decent and you just want to knock the chlorine taste off, because a cheaper carbon pitcher does that job fine.

And whatever you buy, keep the energy drinks out of it.

Watch the Test

Here is the whole thing, meter readings and all:

If you want more reviews where I test things slightly harder than the manufacturer intended, there is a pile of them over at Fizzness Shizzness.

Rob is a Certified Personal Trainer and Nutrition Coach through the National Academy of Sports Medicine. For the past 10 years, Rob has been navigating the health and fitness landscape to better himself and those around him, focusing on tools such as calorie and macro counting, intermittent fasting, and HIIT training techniques.

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