You're renting, you want real drinking water at your kitchen tap, and you've hit the question every renter in this situation eventually asks: does putting in a system mean drilling into an apartment that isn't yours?
The honest answer is yes for the systems that actually filter water safe to drink. But what that means in practice is smaller and more reversible than it probably sounds.
What actually gets drilled, and why
All four of our drinking water systems (Evans 3-Stage, Evans 5-Stage, Purikor 5-Stage, and Purikor 6-Stage) need a single small hole in your countertop or sink deck for a dedicated faucet, unless one's already there from a previous install. That's true even of the electricity-free ultrafiltration systems, which surprises people who assume drilling is only a reverse-osmosis thing. It isn't. Any system that gives you a separate tap for filtered water needs somewhere for that tap to go.
It's one hole, sized for a small faucet base, not a modification to your plumbing, cabinetry, or anything structural. The system itself sits in the cabinet under your sink, connected to your existing cold-water line with a simple valve; nothing about the installation touches walls, floors, or fixtures beyond that one countertop hole.
And sometimes there's no new hole at all. Plenty of aluminum sinks come from the factory with a spare pre-drilled hole for a soap dispenser or a pull-out spray faucet, capped with a blank plug you'd never notice unless you were looking for it. When that's the case, we install into the hole that's already there instead of drilling a new one. Worth checking before you assume drilling is unavoidable.
Is it reversible?
The hole itself doesn't undo itself: that part is permanent. What is reversible is the visible change: when you move out, we remove the faucet and cap the hole with a blank cover plate, so you're not leaving your landlord (or the next tenant) staring at an unexplained hole in the counter. That's the detail worth knowing before you have this conversation, not after: the commitment is smaller than "drilling a hole in a rental" tends to sound like.
Or don't remove it — leaving it behind has a real upside for your landlord
Removing the system when you move out isn't the only option. If your landlord is fine with it staying, a working drinking water system is a genuine amenity for whoever rents the apartment next, not damage to undo, but a feature most landlords would rather advertise than remove. It's the same logic as leaving behind a good showerhead or a window unit: the next tenant benefits, and the landlord has one more thing that makes the apartment easier to rent.
If that's the arrangement you land on, we'd genuinely like to be put in touch with your landlord directly, so we can keep maintaining the system on schedule for whoever lives there next, instead of it quietly going unmaintained the day you leave. That's a real option worth raising in the same conversation where you first ask permission — not an afterthought.
What we're not going to do: give you legal advice
We're a filtration company, not a lawyer, and Mexican rental law and the terms of any specific lease are outside what we can tell you. Some landlords won't care about a single small countertop hole. Others will want to be asked first, in writing, before anyone touches their property. That conversation is genuinely yours to have. We can't have it for you, and we wouldn't want to guess on your behalf. What we can do is tell you exactly what the install involves, in plain terms, so you're walking into that conversation with the real facts instead of a vague worry.
If you'd rather not have that conversation at all
Three products on our menu need no drilling, no tools, and nothing permanent, genuine answers for renters who'd rather sidestep the question entirely: the Bathroom Sink Filter and the Kitchen Faucet Mount thread onto a tap you already have, and the Showerhead Filter swaps in place of the one you've got. All three come off as easily as they went on.
The honest tradeoff: all three are carbon-only, built to cut chlorine, odor, and sediment rather than to physically block bacteria or parasitic cysts the way our drinking water systems' membranes do. They're a real, useful upgrade for taste and for water you're not drinking straight (cooking, showering, brushing your teeth), but they're not a substitute for a membrane if what you actually want is water safe to drink straight from the tap.
The short version
If you want water you can drink directly from your kitchen tap, that requires one small, ultimately reversible hole, and that's worth a quick conversation with your landlord before booking, not after. If you'd rather avoid that conversation altogether, the no-drill carbon filters are a genuine option. Just a different one, solving a different problem. Tell us your situation and we'll walk you through exactly what that means for your specific apartment.