It comes down to taste and safety for me.
I have well water that I like, and I tested it with good results. I drink it most of the time.
My second favorite is bottled water, but different brands taste differently. Like I usually don’t like Dasini, but Deer Park is good.
Municipal tap water is my last choice, I hate the chlorine taste and smell. Seems like I’m drinking pool water. I usually drink tea or soda instead.
English lacks a good generic “you.”
I note you hail from NYC, which is famed for the quality of its tap water. But you still choose bottled. Huh.
That’s why the beer is so good!
But you could equally well fill a canteen and keep that in the car. (I do!) One-time cost for the canteen: under $12.00. After that, no cost at all.
“Y’all”.
However, for me at least, as I’ve said before in the thread, bottled water does taste better to me than old water. Fresh out of the tap water is fine. Water that’s been exposed to air for a couple hours is even better. There occasionally is a sweet spot after that where there’s just barely some infiltration from air particles that gives it that “mountain stream fresh” taste that’s actually tiny impurities. But after that semi-mythical point, it just tastes moldy to me, even if it’s sealed.
That said, I’m not worried about its health, so if I am out of water in the car and there is only a half-empty bottle of water and I have nothing left I will drink it. Sometimes it doesn’t taste so bad and I drink it anyway, cause sometimes I score and it is in the perfect zone.
My parents live in west Texas where the water is very hard. And it turns your teeth brown. While perfectly safe to drink (unless my dumb fart cousin dumps fertilizer over the well again), it is unpleasant and takes the enamel off your teeth.
http://lubbockonline.com/stories/031308/hea_256489487.shtml#.V7zEUfkrJ1M
In Austin, we get the occasional algae bloom which makes the water taste a lot like a fishbowl smells. For that reason, I have a filter on my kitchen faucet. It’s hard to drink smelly water.
There are few things on earth easier to purify, to nearly 100% levels, than water. It’s a simple, distinct chemical compound that separates from nearly every pollutant and other chemical with the gentlest of pushes. It can be done with scraps and sticks in the desert. It can be done on household and commercial levels with simple, low-maintenance equipment. And the result, from pole to pole and longitudes around, whether you start with slop from the Paris sewers or delightfully mineralized fossil water from a deep spring, is… H2O. It’s not like it’s some kind of bad fruit or spoiled meat or complex substance that varies from place to place and crop to crop, year to year so there’s some reason to be fussy about when and where it came from. Water you drank today emerged from someone else’s urethra, probably just days or weeks ago.
There is no reason to ship a drop of water further than the intersection of two spigots. It’s the same stuff, and can be turned completely pure right where you’re drinking it.
So all the complaints about how your household or county water is sooooo bad you just have to drink stuff freighted in from France or Fiji is self-serving bullshit. You live in Texas or Detroit and haven’t invested in a decent home conditioning or filtration (or even distillation) system to give you plentiful, cheap, tasty water? You deserve brown teeth and rancid farts. And to have spent far more of your so-plentiful income hauling water home from someone smarter than you about it.
I drink tap at home. I drink bottled when I’m not home whether I’m running errands locally or away on vacation. Because I am a water snob and NYC tap water really is that much better than other tap water. And I don’t drink Dasani or Aquafina - if I don’t like the tap water, I wont like those brands.
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I may have told this story before but I was living in Upstate NY where there were some places that had minimal processing of their tap water, taking it directly from a very pure stream or lake. Then I visited my grandmother who lived in Queens and commented on the off-taste of the tap water and she replied that NYC had a reputation of very good tasting tap water, which seemed weird to me. Then I moved to Florida and soon I realized that comparatively, NYC tapwater tasted pretty good!
Yeah, at home I avail myself of the delicious watery goodness that is New York City tap water.
On a hot and humid day, I will treat myself to a beaker of chilled Gerolsteiner Mineral Water. It’s an occasional indulgence, like cocaine or an evening in a Chinatown opium den.
Also, I put seltzer in my whiskey.
Wow.
I don’t want to get all Junior Mod-tastic here, but did this thread get moved to the Pit, or what?
There seems to be a rather bizarre usage of the word “scam” in this thread…apparently as in “any benefit perceived by someone else, but not by me.” Such as convenience, for instance.
Well, you’re welcome to drink my aunt’s tap water then. As I stated before, it’s safe, but it tastes like sulfur. Yum!
Yeah. That sounds convenient. :dubious: I’ll stick with bottled.
I think the scam aspect came when bottled water used to be marketed as “safer and cleaner.” That doesn’t seem to happen as much; the ads mostly focus on convenience and flavor.
There is also a scam aspect when bottled water is tap water, put right into the bottles from the same water mains that serve our homes. At very least, it’s deceptive. (Also, the price mark-up is exorbitant.)
It’s no “Nigerian Prince,” but it isn’t as pristine as an Alaskan glacier, either.
Yet in blind taste testing, outside of certain extremes most people can’t taste the difference between water samples. And people’s impression of water can be manipulated easily by raising or lowering the temperature of the water.
Not really though. They try very hard to give the impression their water is somehow healthier or more pure or more fresh. Due to advertising standards and depending on where you live they either say this more or less explicitly. But either way the impression they give is BS which means it’s pretty much a scam.
If I put a label saying “water” on your favourite fruit would that count too? Most fruit is mostly water, and just because it’s got some flavourings in it…
Um, the bottled water I get comes from an naturally occurring artesian well in Quebec. It is fluoride and chlorine free and improves the flavour of all I cook.
How is that a ‘scam’?
All city water will have those two additives, and if you’re accustomed to drinking and cooking with it, you’ll not be aware of the flavours it’s adding to your prepared foods. But, if you’re used to water free of those ingredients, your prepared foods really do taste better. And once you’re used to NOT tasting it in all your food, going back isn’t really an option.
It’s not for you, I understand. But it’s not a scam because it’s not your thing!
Most systems are a 1-day install for a reasonably competent DIYer.
Better systems are a couple of hours for a pro.
You open the tap, and water comes out. Pretty much as much as you want.
You change the filters every 6 to 12 months.
Pretty damned inconvenient. You’re right; if your car needs a minor repair it’s MUCH better to just take a cab everywhere for the rest of your life.
Someone seems to hate capitalism.
His grammar is fine.