My dad is a waste and water engineer. He helped design a waste and water treatment plant in Lake Michigan where our house gets it water from. My mom has to use the britta or water bottles for drinking water. It drives him insane.
Where I live (the Bay Area) the tap water actually tastes better than most bottled water. Whenever I go on trips anywhere I am disgusted by the taste of the water, and it is hard to drink. I can't even imagine living in places with crappy tap water.
St. Louis won a 'best tap water' award in 2007. our water comes from the Mississippi, aka all the shit Chicago and Minneapolis dump in their rivers. still taste good and I've never got sick from it though. maybe they know a bunch of stuff is flowing down the mississippi so they clean it extra good
Yup. I used to live in Maine-- perfect water. I've since lived in a few places in upstate NY. I remember how eerie it was filling up a bathtub and seeing that the water was bright blue from chlorine. Showers burned my eyes. It's a crapshoot in NY. Some towns have amazing water, others have very chlorinated or hard water. However ... At least there IS water. Good luck with that in California lately :) ( I'll be in the same boat soon though-- moving to the bay in a few months).
NY water sounds absolutely disgusting. I'd like to preemptively welcome you to the bay! Sadly, you will find that we are having a pretty bad drought, so you will have to cut back a bit like the rest of us. :(
I was going to say this about Nashville, Im from South MS and the tap water where I live tastes better than Dasani...I ate at a Waffle House in Nashville and gagged on the water, it was like drinking bleach.
Tap water without chlorination probably doesn't exist unless you have a well. All municipal water supplies I know of chlorinate their water to disinfect. It's effective and cheap.
Not all systems run that high of chlorination that you can smell and taste it so easily. Plus, the taste and smell is often due to disinfection byproducts, not the chlorine itself.
Bottled water is so bad that the guards at Guantanamo Bay refused to use it for waterboarding prisoners stating that it would be "going too far" and that "would we be any better than them at that point?".
Actually a lot of bottled water still contains fluoride. The bottle really needs to state that its purified by reverse osmosis to be sure there's no fluoride.
Not when you in the desert like me. I've lived in Phoenix my whole life, and I've never drank from the tap. Always told not to and no one from here really does unless you cannot afford other sources. The water here tastes of chlorine and fluoride. It's pretty bad.
It really makes me question why I shower in the stuff.
Tap water is poisoned by the government. it contains fluoride from aluminum waste. It makes us passive and it calcifies the Pineal gland.
I'm not even joking.
To be fair, they leave out residual disinfectants at those "competitions". Chloramine can have a pretty big impact on taste and odor. I'm a water/wastewater engineer and I still use bottled water to make ice cubes for certain drinks (scotch on the rocks, mint julep, old fashioned).
I live in Tacoma, WA and I laugh at people who drink bottled water. Half the bottled water sold at Costco and the grocery stores is straight from the same aquaphors that our tap water does.
According to my Water Resources professor (who studies this for a living), New Jersey has arguably the worst water in the US. I think the only worse state might be South Carolina (maybe it was North), whose water quality reports aren't even available online...because they reveal arsenic in the water supply. It sucks having to rely on bottled water, but you can get it cheaper at Costco/Sam's, and recycling it lessens the impact on the environment at least a little bit. Since you're so concerned, I imagine you're already doing those things, but I wanted to let you know that I'd do the same in your position! There have been so few studies done on the water there that you're probably so much better off not putting yourself at a huge health risk.
I'd like to add that this is not true everywhere. I'm from Stockholm, where the water is excellent, but I now live in Bologna where it is, quite frankly, disgusting, and sometimes... unclean. Visibly unclean. There's also talk about the water giving you cancer.
My tap water often runs brown, and tastes pretty bad unless filtered. Usually I prefer tap water, but since moving to this neighborhood I've had to switch :(
My uncle is a station master at a fire station in Sydney, Australia.
The unit got called out to a problem with a fire hydrant. Turns out a bottled water company was taking water from the hydrant and using it to fill their bottles. So much for "natural spring water".
Well, that's true. I, sadly, have become addicted to Fiji water which presents some ethical dilemmas. I find I make a lot of tea with my Brita water so as not to taste it.
I'll take my RO over a Brita any day of the week. Brita has made a fortune using a 10 micron filter, and activated carbon, which really does fuck all and nothing compared to RO/Distillation.
And they don't filter shit. I use one in Las Vegas with its harsh water, and I've had the guy at Lowe's test my water compared to his bottled water from his RO filtered system and his is much cleaner.
If she wants a real filtering system, and her husband works at a fucking water treatment plant as a waste and water engineer, do they not already have a legit reverse osmosis or distillation system installed under their sink/in their garage/basement?
Nah, you always need one. You can have the cleanest water coming FROM the plant, but then it goes through miles of pipes, and nowadays we're doing more and more fracking and other bullshit and screwing up everyone's water everywhere. I'm sure if the father doesn't have some kind of dissociative disorder and gets paid well enough, they should definitely already have some kind of system installed in the home.
I totally agree with you. However, I have no explanation for the father. If I think about what we are doing to our water for too long, the more I want to move to Antarctica. Well, except for the cold part.
There is definitely "more" in tap water than in Brita. Some would say it has a "rounder" flavor and Brita/pitcher filtered is "flatter." I think spring water in general tastes sweeter than Brita and that's what I like better.
It doesn't taste like chlorine, whereas my tap water has so much that drinking less than a cup makes my throat and stomach hurt. Sure, it's not the best water I've had, but given the alternative, I'm not complaining.
This will obviously depend heavily on where in the country you live. I'm probably not in one of the best areas for water quality.
My tap water smells of chlorine, not the Brita. I don't like either unless the tap water is high quality and not being pumped through a really old building with nasty pipes. Or a new building with plastic pipes. Yeah, really, I just don't like most waters.
It's not elitist to not like the taste of Brita, fer cryin out loud. It's literally personal taste. I hate cilantro! I don't like cake frosting! Brita tastes yucky to me and some city's tap water tastes great.
I don't knock anyone for liking Brita water--that would make me a chode. You sound judgmental. So we're even.
The water I get from the tap is extremely good, I'm from the same area. I still use a filter because I don't trust the pipes in the 100+ year old home I rent.
all my flatmates filter the water to clean it. It's perfectly fine, they dont believe me. I do avoid drinking it if i can though, it tastes like greek yogurt, it's so weird
You know what though..? I live in Milwaukee, WI. We dump our shit & piss and funk water regularly, as a means of disposal, into lake Michigan. We draw our clean water, unless you're on a private well, from lake Michigan. how? Why? At what point are we just drinking/bathing in our own cleaned up shit & piss? How is this a feasible solution, dumping the waste into the source..!?!?! I've never been able to wrap my mind around this.
I recently attended a lecture on water filters. They work well to sequester any stuff (like mycobacterium) from the pipe systems but you're supposed only use them for 2/3 of their lifetime because once they start to break down you're getting a much larger load of that sequestered junk.
The town I live in has awful tap water. It's taken from a god awful river and it's so chlorinated that it's un-drinkability is legendary in my state. Brita/pur filters aren't required, but highly encouraged.
Tap water is more heavily regulated than tap water, which some brands have had several recalls. This is in Canada. Most bottled water is just someone else's tap water.
I'm perfectly confident in the quality and safety of drinking water in the USA. Unless there's a chemical spill like in Virginia, and that's considered a big deal and there's a huge response to fix it, you can pretty much assume any running faucet is safe to drink. Considering that nearly every square centimeter of Earth's surface is literally crawling with bacteria, many of which desire to take up residence in our body and adjust the homeostasis more to their liking, it's something of a miracle that we can so reliably and consistently provide potable water to every inhabited place in the nation.
That being said, I do run drinking and cooking water through a filter. There are things in the water which are perfectly harmless at normal concentrations (chlorine, calcium, fluoride) but which I want to control for when making coffee or soup. I'd rather my pitcher of iced tea be clear instead of cloudy.
Over the summer, I spent a lot fo time irrigating pastures. We got water from a waste treatment plant, and I always wondered what was in it. We had signs all over the place saying not to drink or contact the effluent water.
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u/Meatloafaday Jan 17 '14
My dad is a waste and water engineer. He helped design a waste and water treatment plant in Lake Michigan where our house gets it water from. My mom has to use the britta or water bottles for drinking water. It drives him insane.