I feel like it helps with allergies, so I break it out in the spring. However, I thought about the fact that you’re not supposed to swallow warm faucet water. With the NetiPot, there is some minor swallowing of the solution. I hope it’s fine since it’s so much cleaner and more convenient.
Technically you’re not supposed to put faucet water up your nose because there’s a slight chance of introducing a brain-eating amoeba into your crainium and it eating your brain.
Is your faucet water not safe to drink? If your faucet water is not safe to drink I wouldn’t recommend putting it up your nose, regardless of how little you swallow.
My faucet water is safe to drink and I use it straight from the tap for my Neti pot without worry. I’d have no issues with using my shower water for the task. YMMV
You’re only supposed to use distilled water for any type of nasal irrigation. It’s okay to microwave it for 20 seconds and/or add salt, though.
With a Neti pot, you need to boil the water and add salt. At the very least, if you can’t boil the water, then make sure to add salt. There should be salt packets that come with the pot. If not, then add your own table salt and let the mixture sit for a while. The salt is necessary to kill the Nagleria Fowleri (brain-eating amoeba.) It is rare to get an N. Fowleri infection in your brain via the sinuses, but IF it happens, it’s almost 100% fatal, so this is one Russian Roulette you don’t want to play.
Many cities will have already purified the water with chlorine to kill N. Fowleri. But, again, this is a risk you don’t want to take, so, at the very least, boil the water and/or add salt.
The salt in a Neti pot solution isn’t for killing bacteria. It’s for creating saline. It’s also mixed with sodium bicarbonate. You can’t just pour water into your sinuses it burns like a motherfucker. Saline is the whole point of it - it soothes your sinuses.
Yeah, that was always my understanding (and my experience.) I’ve never heard anything about it killing the brain eating bacteria. I’ve always just used regular faucet water and the salt when I’ve used it.
I use tap water for my neti pot, and have done so for years. The risk of brain-eating amoebae or other infections is very, very, very small. You’re far more likely to get struck by lightning twice, frankly.
And the salt/bicarb is to buffer the rinse and make it more physiologic. Otherwise it’ll burn like hell.
QtM, neti pot prescriber and user.
I have well water, and prefer to filter and/or boil it prior to using it to irrigate my sinuses. Not that it’s unhealthy - it’s tested at least once a year and it’s fine to drink - but it is completely untreated, natural water and have some (normally) benign bacteria I still don’t want to introduce to my innards in to intimate a manner. Probably being a bit over-cautious on my part, but it’s no big deal to do and why not?
Salt, shower water. No bicarb. Water is chlorinated. Works fine, so far so good re: brain-eating bacteria [anecdote].
It’s been ages since I’ve needed to use mine, but whenever I do, I boil the water first, add a packet of salt crystals that came with the kit, and let it cool to body temperature. It actually doesn’t take that long to cool in a plastic pot - maybe 15 minutes at the most.
CPAP machine users are told to use distilled water in the humidifier. Is that also to prevent the rare infection? I use filtered drinking water from those machines in front of the supermarket. Am I risking some other horrible fate?
I use ceramic. No plastics for me wherever I have an alternative.
I’ve used tap water plus the special foil packets of salt for my little sinus rinse squeeze bottle for years. But, then, I have a deep well. I’ve read that shallow wells or other sources easily contaminated with surface water are much less safe to use for this.
Devices that send water up into your sinuses would do an especially thorough job of introducing dangerous pathogens up there, but they’re hardly the only way it could happen. Swimming, and creating a big cloud of mist while cleaning, would be other ways. I figure that the people who make these devices push the point in part because if they get associated with even one famous and grisly case, their whole business would vanish – and their business model is based on creating a HUGE population of people using their product. I think I’m practically safe, but I’m not so sure their entire customer base is safe from having a single event.
I’d guess that’s because the humidifier is designed to evaporate water and if the water has dissolved salts in it it will leave scale that could corrode the device.
I realized that I didn’t buy the NetiPot, but rather the plastic squeeze bottle with the individual packets. While my tap water is safe to drink (I assume), I would use shower water which is warm. My concern was that warm tap water can be dangerous to consume. It sounds like there’s a minor chance of serious illness, but not more than other routine things I’m exposed to on a regular basis.
Any particular reason?
Until the evidence is in on bisphenols, phthalates, etc., I prefer to decrease my exposure at home, where I have some control.
Why would warm tap water be any more dangerous to consume than cold tap water? 
Hot (or warm) water comes from a hot water heater and minerals will show up in bigger particles than cold water which does not go through a heater. My proof is our garden hoses don’t have mineral scales (nor the toilet… at the old house it was a really, really old toilet which we replaced because it did have limescale from decades of use) vs the coffee pot, the kitchen sink or the shower at the new house, 3 blocks away. The former 3 have been replaced or been super scrubbed in the last 10 years.
I’m on a deep well and I use my electric kettle to boil water, wait a couple hours (cos the water gets way hot really quick) and then fill my plastic nasal irrigation (plus the salt/baking soda mix).
I have yet to see much of a difference for my allergies when using an irragator. But it does seems to soothe when my snot is streaming.