Is it worth having one of those jug water filters to clean up your otherwise clean tap water? Three students from Kilrush Community School, Co Clare, may have the answer.
Aisling Crowe, Jennifer Coole and Marie Culligan have entered this year's exhibition with a project entitled, "Filtered Water - Is it Worth It?"
They ran an exhaustive series of tests on eight different samples of public water from mains and private wells, and followed these up after putting the water through two different brands of jug water filter.
They initially used a commercial water testing kit to check for calcium, magnesium, nitrates, pH and ammonium in each sample before and after filtering.
They found that their results were not conclusive using the test kit alone, so they moved on to another battery of tests.
They did titration experiments on samples in their original state, after filtering and again after boiling to assess the level of water hardness.
They then boiled the water samples and repeated the filtering to do follow-up tests for all of the water parameters.