I left a half-used and capped bottle of spring water next to my old CRT
monitor for a few days, and when I went to drink from it, the taste was
horrible (like dusty burnt grease) and it made a hot sensation in my
mouth. The couple of swallows I took gave me indigestion that lasted
for several minutes. I live alone, so I’m sure no one doctored my
water (the cat isn’t that clever). I’m wondering if the electromagnetic field from
the monitor inadvertantly ionized the water in the acid direction.
If so, maybe I could make my own low-cost disinfectant! I repeated this
on purpose, as a test, and got the same result. Anybody know what happened or had the same experience?
To put it simply: No. First of all, the EMF from your monitor couldn’t do anything like that in the first place. Second, even if it did, it couldn’t cause any permanent changes: As soon as you took it away from the ionizing source, all the ions would recombine into water again. I don’t know what did happen to your water, but that wasn’t it: The cat doctoring it is far more likely (and you don’t want to think about what a cat might have doctored your water with).
Thirdly, ionized water wouldn’t taste like that (it would taste like water, because that’s what it would be), and fourthly, what on earth makes you think it would be a good disinfectant?
You got some backwash into the bottle, and got some bacterial or other nasties growing in the water. Simple as that.
Be a real scientist. Take 3 bottles. Leave one unopened. Open the second, and pour (don’t drink, and don’t touch the opening) half of it out. Take the 3rd, and drink half of it directly from the bottle. Leave all 3 of them in the same place for a week. Open all 3, and test, or even better, get someone who doesn’t know which water came from which bottle to test them.
My first thought was that a plastic bottle of water sitting next to a CRT might get a lot of heat from the monitor, leaching some of the plastic compounds into the water resulting in the nasty taste.
Just a thought - any chance an old CRT still puts out some X-Rays? This was more of a problem with early color TVs, but I guess it could be possible. You could then have chain scissioning in the polymers composing the bottle, maybe setting free various oligomers and other odd bits that diffuse into the water.
A test of this might be to retrieve two identical empties of these plastic water bottles, leave one in front of the old CRT a few days (while it’s operating), and then compare the two empties. Cut them into strips. Do the strips from the exposed bottle break easily, or look crazed, or smell funny?
This would be my guess as well. Hydrolyze those phthalates and you’ll get a greasy alcohol and a slightly acidic phenol that probably won’t taste nice. But presumably the bottled water isn’t always kept in a temperature controlled environment so I would expect this bottle to taste nasty even when unopened sometimes. It could be the bacteria had something to do with it. Also, you added oxygen to the system by opening it. Oxygen could have had something to do with it. I strongly suspect the off flavor comes from the plastic. That would easily explain greasy.
What isn’t happening, is the ionization of water from an incidental EM field. Water is always ionizing to some degree on it’s own. That’s how it’s supposed to taste.
To all who posted – thanks for your prompt and interesting answers!
Smeghead,
I read someplace that water containing positive ions will kill bacteria. Probably posted by someone selling supposedly ionized water.
muldoonthief,
I didn’t drink directly from the bottle. I’ve used the same brand of water in the same bottles in my kitchen for years and never had that experience.
Valgard and WarmNPrickly,
that seems plausible, though the temp next to the monitor is only warm, not hot. I’m going to try putting an empty capped bottle there for a few days to see if the air inside starts smelling the way the water tasted. I’ll let you know what happens.
Napier,
the bottle was beside the monitor, not in front of it. But I’ll try your experiment, just to see. Will post the results.