I live in Thailand and am having a debate with other expats about whether its safe to drink ice cubes made from local tap water. I’ve done it a few times with no ill effects. They tell me I’m an idiot and am slowly poisoning myself because apparently the pipes are contaminated with heavy metals.
Even if they were, I don’t drink large amounts of tap water, I ONLY use it for ice cubes which are frozen for 24 hours which is a very small quantity. Is there any real health risks to this?
Freezing for 24 hours won’t kill microbes and it won’t remove any metallic contamination. The ice cubes are constantly melting into your drink and releasing both the microbes they contain and whatever heavy metals are in them. IOW, ice cubes are as bad as drinking the water, unless you’re using the reusable kind that have the liquid inside a plastic shell.
When I lived in Aceh, Indonesia I used bottled water for ice and all cooking, but only after I had a nasty case of typhoid, it will change your perspective.
Interesting username/post combo. And yes, **jayjay **got it in one. Freezing won’t change anything about local tap water that’s dangerous or unhealthy: bacteria, amoeba or other contamination, nor dissolved metals.
Seems like such an easy risk to avoid, especially when the alternative is dysentery or worse.
My wife used to think that freezing things would kill germs, and then I pointed out that they store germs cryogenically…
I met a well-off local in India who happily drinks the tap water with no ill effects. If I tried it I’d be sick. Perhaps your gut has built up an immunity to the local water.
The only time that I EVER got ill in Mexico is when I asked for ice in a drink. Unless I made the ice myself from bottled water, I would NEVER get nor use ice in a nation which did not have developed water and sanitation system.
If you wouldn’t drink the water, why would you drink the frozen water?
Where I live, in the Yucatan Peninsula, the ice factories make three kinds of ice. Ice cubes, for use in cocktails, made with purified water. Ice blocks, used for making shaved ice drinks, made with purified water. And ice blocks for icing down beer, made with tap water. No one here drinks tap water. A business would not use ice for drinks made from tap water. They like repeat customers.
ignorance fought, for some reason I assumed that freezing would kill germs. I know better now, thanks.
I can’t imagine heavy metals accumulating in water pipes made from GI and sealed with teflon around the screw threads. Copper sealed with lead is strictly for sewer pipes.
When the ice melts, it is exactly the same water that was frozen to form the ice, containing exactly the same impurities in exactly the same concentrations which will have exactly the same effect.
Yes, but what can purification using UV light and activated carbon do against dissolved heavy metals and other poisons in solution?
I suggest you get in the habit of buying ice from a local shop (or 7-11, but they are more expensive). It’s really cheap and you will not get sick, they use clean drinking water.
You will not get enough heavy metals to do any discernible harm by drinking the water for a couple of weeks on vacation. People who live there get a constant barrage of those impurities during their whole lifetime, but you get to go home and stop drinking it in a couple of weeks, so you can go slack.
The tap water in Bangkok is supposedly safe. I’m not sure I trust that, but we throw caution to the wind anyway and have been drinking it for years. We do boil it, but that won’t get rid of heavy metals, I know. Still, no discernible effects.
Ice cubes should be okay here. I’ve never heard of problems associated with them. The companies that produce them all seem to have pretty good standards.
One of the misconceptions about unsafe drinking water is that it is always unsafe and will always cause illness if consumed. This isn’t true for most piped water systems. The contamination comes in spikes and boluses. So, you may be fine to drink the water 100 times, but on the 101st, you could get cholera, typhoid, crypto, norovirus, or any of the other waterborne infections. It’s just not worth the risk.
When I lived in the Congo we boiled our water, and only made ice from boiled water. My mother got sick once from eating a salad washed in unboiled water.
That was 50 years ago - it’s probably worse now,
I’ve known lots of people with the same misconception, and to those I usually point out that if freezing temps killed germs, winter wouldn’t be cold’n’flu season. (Reaction has always been, “OOOooohhhh.”) Not the most scientific of explanations, but given that they missed a lot of science background to think that in the first place, it has a way of reaching the audience.
I don’t get it. Is the theory that the alcohol and/or hops in the beer will kill any microbes? 
I thought he meant to put beer bottles/cans in to keep them cold, not to actually put IN beer. I don’t think I’ve ever seen beer on the rocks, to tell the truth.