Carbon (aka Charcoal aka Activated Carbon aka Active Carbon) is wood or nutshells or other things heated to the point of blackness in the absence of oxygen. It has an extremely hight surface area (like the size of a tennis court for a a little bit in your hand.)
I'm not an authority but in my reading here, many TFF members report that its best use is for the short period after medications have been used and you want to now clear the medication out of the water. Carbon will "adsorb" things out of the water for a short period of time, reported to be as short as 3 days, after which it is essentially useless. There is controversey about whether it then may begin leaching these same substances back into the water. The latest reports I've read say this is not really true, but the back and forth about this is probably still alive.
So Carbon has basically been banished to the storage shelf by most TFF reports and is pulled down to be used for this specific function of ridding the water of left-over meds. And even that function is limited to just certain meds, which ones I don't know.
~~waterdrop~~
