The Con Trick of "Consumables"

Whilst it may have taken me a long time to cotton on to the fact that ink costs more than printers and that most things that used to be free like television (licence fee apart) now mostly have to be paid for, I realised this week that this fact of modern life has assumed ludicrous proportions. I moved house earlier this year, after painful months of major works, including a new kitchen. This week a card landed through my letterbox addressed to me by name and reminding me that it was time to buy a new cartridge for my kitchen tap. Now I already have a water softener and I have to shell out huge sums for big blocks of salt to keep that fed, so what on earth is the cartridge on my tap for?

I peered under the sink, which is a spaghetti junction of pipes (the picture above shows just one corner), and lo and behold there was a white cartridge nestling there, connected by a blue plastic tube to the underside of the kitchen tap. But why could I possibly need this when I have softened water and drinking water via an enormous American style fridge freezer?

I went online to the card-sender's website and discovered my taps are designed to filter out smells and unpleasant tastes and will save me a fortune in bottled water. Well I don't buy bottled water. In restaurants I ask for tap and apart from the occasional bottle of fizzy I have always been happy to leave my fate in the hands of the local water authority (after all they charge us enough for that privilege). It turns out that I will require a replacement cartridge every six months and this will cost me around £64 per year as well as approximately 5 minutes of my time to replace the cartridge, having first isolated the water supply to the tap. In other words, someone else has found a way to extract money from me for something I did not know I needed and certainly know I do not want. It will also require me to go out and buy the necessary spanners to make my way through Spaghetti Junction, which knowing me I will cock up and then I will have to get someone in to fix the resultant leak. I can already feel the stress coming on. If I do nothing and just leave the old filter in place, the website warns me that harmful bacteria could be building up inside it. This means I will doubtless need to get it removed and the pipes reconnected around where it was. So I am damned if I do and damned if I don't. Maybe I should just risk the salmonella? Any suggestions?