Remember, that some filters remove bacteria and the finest sediment only (the candle type). Others remove sediment of all sizes and bacteria, too; while still others kill flavor to boot. Discuss the point with your plumber, architect, doctor and manufacturer and water department. As with clothes so with filters: buy what suits the need and buy carefully after securing all the advice available. One might say pompously that the purchasing of a filter may be the purchase of life itself, or--facetiously--that the good filter takes the “imp” out of impure water. CHAPTER XXXIII OUTSTRIPPING THE GALE Weather strips are not the caviar of the building menu--far from it. They are a whole lot more like the roast beef with pan gravy and baked potatoes. Those of you who bought weather stripping years ago and either put it on yourself or had the town carpenter tack it on, do not believe it is any good, and at best only a “fancy fixing.” But those days are passed and the weather strip has properly outstripped many other things in development and has come to be no hors d’oeuvre but the pièce de resistance of the bill-of-fare. So important has the effect of the strip become that heating and ventilating engineers have been and are to-day carrying on experiments, not to prove their value (no, for this has been proven), but to have exact data to show how much fuel is saved and just how evenly the temperature can be maintained throughout a home under varying conditions of gale and stability outdoors and in. (See Chapter XXXV, Heating). THINGS THEY OBVIATE Do you care to heat the great outdoors? This is the first important question. If you do, how dare you with the shortage of coal to-day? Have you sufficient coal to waste it? Is your home hard to heat? Why? Do you like the gales and little hurricanes racing over your floors, chasing the little snow flakes? Do you like to cultivate colds and other draught diseases? These are pertinent questions even if they seem impertinent. They suggest the graphic pictures that we do not want inhabiting our homes. These conditions can be obviated. If you inquire from your friends who know intelligently the value of the furnishings they use, you will get concrete figures before investing. One conspicuous friend, Uncle Sam, says that in 1918 he saved two million dollars’ worth of coal by the use of weather strips. And this led the director of conservation to make the extravagant statement that weather strips are 100% fuel conservation. WHAT THEY ARE In the past when the telephone had just become a household staple and before horse cars evaporated you used to paste the weather strips on the outside of your windows. Then they were made of cloth, or rubber or heavy paper, and they made life slightly fair and warmer; but most of the heat accrued by them was that which was fired in trying to raise the windows which stuck due to the adherence of the weather strip.