I’ve always thought the reason hot tap water was bad for consumption was because of the anode in the water tank. It’s basically a sacrificial rod of magnesium or aluminum that rusts away so the steel tank won’t.
My house is about 20 years old. I suck my own well water from the ground. My pipes are all copper with presumably SnPb connections. I have upgraded certain fixtures and shut-off valves myself and have used SnPb connections on copper pipes. I’m about as concerned about this as I am about every other health scare that comes around: for example the lead in window blinds, BPA in hard plastic bottles, pesticides on purchased fruit and vegetables, or hormones in meat, etc.
Fer Christ’s sake people, we’re talking about parts per million of stuff that may possibly pose a risk if fed to rats in quantities that would make Orson Wells look like an anorexia patient.
You have no issues walking around in cities and breathing in all they have to offer, yet some health scare fanatic starts mentioning the risks involved with some of this crap and alarm bells go off: we wear synthetic clothing, we breathe in diesel fumes, we drink alcohol, we smoke or breathe second-hand smoke, we take hot baths and showers in this so-called lead soup, we are irradiated with modulated radio frequencies from umpteen sources constantly, we are exposed to UV light from our wonderful star, we eat irradiated food, we complicitly expose ourselves to X-rays, we eat charred flesh from animals, we touch doorknobs of unknown biological history, we let dogs lick us on the mouth, we have high frequency signals zapping our crotches every time we sit sown on the couch with a lap top, we take our lives in our hands every time we operate or are a passenger in a two-ton lump of steel and glass whizzing down the highway at 70 MPH… yet we worry about what, 50 Parts Per Million of lead ingestion?
Man!
Right–so what matters is the age of the interior plumbing and the building connection from the main to the house, of course.
(Actually, what really matters is whether or not lead solder was used or not, regardless of age.)
I was more or less agreeing with you until your last sentence.
I would sure as hell worry about 50 ppm of lead ingestion. That’s a extremely high concentration of lead. The maximum allowable level in public water supplies is only 15 parts per billion.
Modern life is indeed a tradeoff. However, we are far safer today due to regulatory standards than we were in the past, when people unknowingly poisoned themselves with mercury (used in hat making), radium (for watch faces), and lead (in paint, gasoline, and plumbing).
You can be as jaded as you like about the risks of the modern world, especially now that we are studying more subtle risks (such as those posed by BPA or hormones), but do not lump all pollutants in the same boat.
There is no safe level for lead. It’s deleterious effects on the human body is well-established. The effects are far more pronounced in children, but lead affects adults as well.
For those that claim that city water won’t have lead in it.
The town I just moved out of had pretty crappy water, even after treatment.
Residents got a report every couple of years, and I just looked up the last one.
2007 - Lead
Action Level (level that will trigger special action)
15 ppb - This is the level the EPA set in the Safe Drinking Water Act
90% level (average of the 60 sites, after the highest 10% were tossed out)
12.0ppb
So the 54 LOWEST samples average just 3ppb below the trigger level.
And none of that water had yet come through the 30 year old pipes in the house.
In California at least, lead sampling is one of the only samples that are taken at the consumer’s end point. We’re also instructed by the EPA to select the older houses, that are more likely to have lead in their plumbing, as the sample points. So yes, those samples probably did go through the pipes at the houses.
I pulled the 50 PPM number out of my ass; I have no idea what the acceptable levels are. My point is that people tend to worry incessantly about potential minuscule health hazards while continually engaging in situations that are much, much more deleterious to one’s health.
I have worked in the electronics industry for 25 years now. We handled boards with bare hands, we soldered without fume hoods, we used our mouths as a third hand to hold solder in some instances! Is exposure to lead harmful? Yeah but please let’s keep things in perspective.
The same can be said about UV, yet the beaches are still crowded.
I like Leaffan’s response.
So I assume you don’t cook with metal pots & pans, or for that matter use plastic utensils or storage containers either? The negligable (if any) amount of contaminants added to your water through a few seconds of exposure to a mildly elevated temperature are nothing compared to the exposure times and high temperatures associated with your cookware, storage containers, and assorted utenils and kitchen gadgets… not to mention the oils used and acidic conditions often created in your skillet… OR the miles of metal/plastic distribution pipes your city has already piped that water through, etc…
We can worry ourselves sick over a fraction of a picogram of metal leaching into our tap water from the 20 feet of household plumbing, but then we go ahead and boil our cold tea water for 5 minutes in the metal kettle that grandma left us. We can rinse the bacon with ultra-filtered tap water but then go ahead and fry it nice and crispy in the good old cast iron pan and use the cheap spatula that rusts every time it gets wet to turn it. And we can use expensive bottled water to make our favorite spicey tomato soup which we first boil and then store in the metal soup pot in the fridge for 5 days. Then we re-heat it in a plastic container, and gobble the steaming results up with plastic utensils in the lunch room while lecturing the “uninformed” about the dangers of deadly contaminants.
I did a long and much smarter write up on this question years ago… I don’t know if it’s still around. But suffice it to say, you (in general) don’t need to worry about your water getting contaminated by your water heater. If you do have a lead-in-water problem, it ain’t gonna be with the “hot” tap. You get orders of magnitude more exposure to “contaminants” through mundane every-day tasks than you do by turning on the faucet - either one.
Years ago, i read something where a historian posited that the ancient Romans succumbed to lead poisoning. The theory was this: the Romans used lead kettels to boil wine in, and the lead entered the wince. Drinking this contaminated wine lead to insanity, paralysis, and death. I also remember that the theory was difficult to test, becasue most Roman dead were cremated.
Anybody know more?
And apparently all the aqueducts were made of lead too.
No cite, but I’ve heard that the Romans stored the wine in lead vessels with the intention of picking up as much lead as possible, because of the sweet taste added by the lead.
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The difference between cooking containers and a hot water heater is that the water in a hot water heater sits there for hours (even days) compared to much shorter periods of time on a stove.
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I wouldn’t store acidic foods like tomato sauce in a metal pot.
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I don’t generally use metal kettles–I usually heat water in a pyrex container in the microwave. A metal kettle wouldn’t bother me though, but I probably wouldn’t use an old one passed on to me by my grandmother, any more than I’d use her Fiestaware with the uranium glaze.
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I don’t care how expensive the bottled water is–all bottled water is essentially unregulated. In general, any public water supply is fine.
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I don’t lecture people in the lunchroom. Just on the SDMB.
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I don’t worry myself sick about contaminants in the environment, but if by my actions and choices, I can take simple steps to avoid unnecessary exposure to environmental pollutants (for me and my family), I usually take them. You folks seem to be of the mindset that you can’t do anything about environmental pollutants, so you may as well maximize your exposure. Fine. You can do whatever you like.
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You know, it’s ironic that we’re having this discussion on the same day that the EPA is reporting that improvements in air quality over the last couple of decades has measurably increased people’s life expectancy and quality of life.
That’s not entirely true. People do need a certain amount of sunlight exposure to make Vitamin D. That being said, people should also wear sunscreen at the beach. I do, and I put it on my wife and son, too.
It all comes down to what you consider an acceptable risk.
The amount of lead listed to be acceptable in drinking water is 15ppb. This is a listed threshold not a number at which the water suddenly becomes deadly. Usually standards for consumption are based off studies. A study might find at 20ppb lead may start impacting the most susceptible portion of the population like infants pregnant women etc. The less susceptible portion of the population may not show signs of health impact till 100ppb. The research could also find lead isn’t guaranteed to effect your health until the number hits 50ppm. Its still then reasonable to use a safety margin and say 15ppb is a safe number to go with even though its a number far lower then needed for most people.(sorry I’m pulling numbers out of my ass but I don’t feel like looking them up atm.)
Water for municipal supplies is tested at multiple points including users homes and people are notified appropriately.
Lead gets into the water through plumbing.
In older cities like Washington DC the original plumbing was lead pipe. As the water in lead pipe is constantly exposed to lead in large amounts its likely to have to cause water to be unsafe for consumption do to lead contamination. Cities go through tremendous expenses to replace these lines so that the can make sure they are supplying safe water that meets the national standards.
In older homes 50+ years may have used brass or steal pipe its possible the pipes themselves where manufactured with lead in the metal. The if the water is slightly corrosive it may leach some lead into the supply. Maybe even enough to breach the threshold.
In homes 30 year old with copper piping the pipes themselves shouldn’t contain any lead but the solder joints may. The amount of contact the water has with lead is very minimal its very unlikely that these joints are contaminating the water enough to reach the threshold. If the water is corrosive enough it could do so sitting in the pipes overnight. At that point the amount of copper in the water is going to be a more significant health risk.
If your replacing pipes in your house do to corrosion I’d probably avoid drinking the water.installing a neutralizer is probably a good idea.
Heating water can cause water to act more corrosively so problems that occur in cold water can be amplified in hot water.
As a person that works in the businesses of supplying water to peoples homes and treating water for consumption I feel the article cited is ridiculous for the average person, to go through some of those steps to me is crazy.
I will run a faucet a minute or so before filling a glass to drink. I do tend to use cold water for cooking mostly because I’ve seen the inside of many water heaters and they tend to collect ‘crap’ I doubt its actually a real risk using hot water but its habit I don’t have motivation to change.
My opinion is people put themselves at far more risk walking around and breathing the air in a city then they would drinking a glass of hot water straight from the tap first thing in the morning.
About Roman plumbing: The supply pipes were made of lead, which readily leached into the water, possibly causing a large amount of lead poisoning over time.
Plumbers are called plumbers because Pb is the chemical symbol for lead, they worked with plumbum (lead, Pb). Some lead is still used in plumbing; vent stacks, toilet flanges, etc.
Slight hijack: was lead piping the standard prior to lead concerns and switching to copper/PVC/whatever? I ask because I live in an 80-year-old building and I can only assume I’m at a considerably higher risk due to my property’s age… The building was renovated in '86 I believe, but I imagine that would only be for superficial purposes and wouldn’t involve touching the pipes.