Is tap water harmful?
Is bottled water any better?
What about those filters that you can put on the faucet/
Have you ever noticed that Evian is “naive” spelled backwards?
(this quote belongs to Dennis Miller, I wish I could claim it was an Avalongod original)
And Avalongod backwards is “Dog No Lava.” I’m not sure what that means but it has got to be significant in some way.
Hey maybe its spanglish: “Dog, don’t wash!”
-S
<slap to forehead>
Ay Carumba! I think THAT is Spanish.
The filters that use charcoal, that you clip onto your faucet, just remove some of the bad taste and odors, but they don’t remove any of the pesticides, herbicides, lead, or fluoride. However, it’s questionable how much of these things your tap water contains. Myself, I tend to have more faith in the local water company than the people at the health food store do. If the Water Department says it’s potable, then heck, it’s potable.
Otherwise, don’t worry about it too much. There comes a time when you just have to figure, “Hey, life’s too short, we’re all going to die of something or other.”
If you really want pure water, buy what’s called a “reverse osmosis filter”. Serious fishtank hobbyists buy them to get pure water for saltwater fish.
I believe the first place I heard that was from Janeane Garofalo in Reality Bites.
Unless a warning is issued, your tap water is fine. Tap water quality is regulated by the EPA, while bottled water is regulated as a food product by the FDA. As a result, the contaminant standards for tap water are more stringent, and testing is required daily (as opposed to monthly for bottled water sources).
The difference in taste has to do with chlorination. Chlorine is the cheapest antibacterial additive by far, so most tap water is chlorinated. A lot of bottled water is drawn from local tap water sources and filtered to remove the chlorine. Some companies have their own springs. There is nothing special about spring water, it is just ground water. Two years ago the NRDC did a random sampling of the more popular bottled waters and found levels of metals, organics, and bacteria in some samples that exceeded EPA or California standards (I don’t know about standards in other states). I’ll add here that there is no evidence at this point that anyone has ever gotten sick from drinking bottled water.
Chlorine can be removed using an activated charcoal filter, which is how most bottled water companies do it. A much cheaper way is to filter your own tap water, using a Brita, Pur, or other filter (activated charcoal also removes metals, but not bacteria or cysts). You don’t have to spend the $ to attach a filter to your faucet, you can get the same effect with a filtered pitcher. The pitcher has two advantaged over the tap filter: You keep it in the fridge, so the water is always cold; and (most important) it is gravity-fed, so you get better contact time with the filter element. Tap filters frequently push water through too quickly to work well…
If you use a filter: You are removing chlorine, which kills bacteria, cysts, etc… If you do not change the filter element frequently (most modern ones have an indicator), the old filter can become a veritable petri-dish of nasty bugs. A coupla years ago the state of California did a random inspection of those water machines you find in front of supermarkets (which dispense filtered tap water) and found that many had never had their filters changed.
But Chlorine is good for your teeth. In school in Germany, we recived chlorine to swish aroung in our mouths for 2 minutes once a week. Tasted like peppermint shit though.
But Chlorine is good for your teeth. In school in Germany, we recived chlorine to swish aroung in our mouths for 2 minutes once a week. Tasted like peppermint shit though.
DDG, my friend, you’re lucky you didn’t live in Milwaukee in the spring of 1993! You never would have wrote what you posted.
Perhaps you recall when our water got tainted with cryptosporidium? (It made national headlines). Hundreds of thousands got extremely ill, (including my wife & I) and dozens died. Have you ever puked so hard you thought the second comming was heaving out of your guts? Have you ever shit so much you actually lost a great deal of weight because of it? Multiply these by 10 times a day for 9 days! With no cure except time!
Why did this happen??
Because the local water utility said our water was A-OK to drink! Yeah right.
I’ll never, ever drink water that isn’t boiled or bottled again! Never, ever, EVER!!
Well, bottled water isn’t “pure”, but it is clean. Tap water should be perfectly safe to drink without filtering it or boiling it. If you have old lead piping in your house, you might want to get something that would filter out lead. I know California (LA, anyways) has really stringent water-purification processes. They also underwent a large repiping of water systems to remove as much lead piping as they could.
I hope you meant flouride! Chlorine is hazardous in large doses. I suppose it would kill off bacteria nicely though. Fluoride would not address bacteria but would strengthen teeth.
Tap water for a large community must pass strict health standards. And hopefully your house’s piping is not old (they used to use lead solder which can leach into your drinking water).
Tap water for a small community can have fewer standards to meet, if any.
Your own private well depends on the groundwater in your area. It’s a good idea to test it periodically.
Bottled water can be either spring water or regular old tap water that had an extra filtration step. It depends on the company. In general, groundwater (or spring water) is cleaner than surface water (reservoir), but groundwater is also easily contaminated.
One big caveat is that (I think) bottled water is not subject to the same standards that your tap water is. Hopefully, the bottled water companies have good testing procedures.