I was assured by more than one residential apartment management person that the unfiltered tap water was perfectly safe to drink…but there’s got to always be lead, copper, other metals, anyway, no? Especially in the South/Southwest?
I’m going to get myself a Brita system/filter, but I haven’t turned into a walking lead/copper/manganese filter have I?
My mother’s been drinking unfiltered tap water for nearly 73 years.
If we’re going with a single point of data, you’ll have a long, healthy life. Especially if you mix it with bourbon sometimes.
There’s nothing wrong with unfiltered tap water, unless you live in a third-world country or there’s a water boil advisory due to work on the system or something.
I drink unfiltered ground water from my well. There are always trace amounts of minerals and metals and some of them are actually good for you.
Lead isn’t good for you. But the amount of lead in treated municipal systems would be completely insignificant.
Reminds me of a family story.
Know it all engineer married into the family.
“Using all that cast iron cookware is increasing your chances of cancer”
“Grandma Fish has been using it exclusively for 95 years and she’s okay”
“Well, it takes time”
You can contact the company/municipality that provides your tap water. If you ask they will probably give you a report with statistics about your water and what is in it.
With that being said, most Americans drink tap water, and most of us still seem to be upright and walking.
One of my sisters got weird after she got married. She refuses to use tap water for anything other than washing. She has bottled water for cooking and drinking and she buys bagged ice. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t question the source of the bottled water or the ice.
Another sister won’t drink “bathroom” water. If she needs to take an aspirin, she’ll go downstairs to the kitchen for a glass of water. Of course, I’ve seen her bathroom, and it’s pretty gross, but she does the same thing anywhere.
My sisters are weird. As for me, I won’t drink hose water because it always tastes like the inside of a rubber hose. It’s not worry about germs or anything - just the flavor. That’s perfectly normal. Really.
Unless your tap water is truly bad, somehow, go ahead and drink it.
Now, I admit I do use a Brita pitcher, but that’s because our tap water just doesn’t taste as good to me (the chlorine I assume). And growing up, our tap water wasn’t good at all - it was well water, run through a water softener, so no surprise there.
Depending on what your hose is made of, it may leach toxic chemicals into the water as it passes through. The last hose I bought came with a warning saying it was not intended for supplying drinking water.
As for tap water, yes, municipal water supplies have to adhere to state and federal water quality standards. Here in Ann Arbor, we receive regular water quality reports. They used to come via US mail; they’ve stopped doing that, but the reports are still available on the web. Wherever you live, it’s likely that water quality reports are available for you as well.
If your water comes from a private well, all bets are off; you should have your water quality tested on a regular basis, but I suspect a lot of people don’t do this.
The safety record of American tap water is exemplary. Modern potable water systems are one of humanity’s greatest achievements. Drink and be merry. But not from the garden hose.
: gets up on soapbox:
Bottled water is the biggest hype there ever was. I drink a lot of tap water, filling my 24 oz bottle at least three times a day and draining it.
Americans think the minerals in their water make it un fit to drink. :rolleyes: One of the greatest blessings we have in this country is in most of it the water is regulated and healthy and safe. You haven’t seen water unfit to drink until you go to a place like India.
Bottled water is often glorified tap water (up to 25 %!). It causes a huge mess in landfills with all of those bottles. It costs a lot of money.
It is just like diamonds. The companies have sold us a false bill, saying that bottled water is better for us, just like blood diamonds are worth their exorbitant prices. You know how to tell artificial diamonds from the ones mined? The artificial ones have no flaws! That’s right, we are paying MORE for a flawed item. Same with bottled water.
: climbs off soapbox :
I will admit that when my inlaws lived in Jacksonville, FL, I didn’t like to drink their tap water. But it reeked of sulfur and it had little floaty things in it - and this was city water, not a well! Fortunately, shortly after my husband and I got married, his folks sold that house and built a place in the boonies and drilled a deep well - good water at that point!
Where I work, the tapwater was tested by EPA officials and declared “within acceptable limits” for lead.
EPA officials appointed by the Bush administration.
I portage in my own filtered water, thank you very much.
:dubious: The EPA is on its third post-Bush administrator, and FWIW, I’m pretty sure the administrator ain’t the official who tests your water.
If you’re seriously still concerned, grab a sample and send it out for testing; you can save yourself the long-term expense and hassle of supplying your own water on the job.
Yeah, city water in Jacksonville is awful. Your in-laws got lucky with the well. I dated someone whose parents had a well, and the water was sulfurous. Even if you put ice cubes made from that water in a Coke, you could smell the water. Ugh. It was like SATAN had a hand in the stuff.
The water tasted bad enough in Florida that I refused to drink water on a regular basis until I moved to Massachusetts. The tap water here is really quite good. My mom loves it. Now I happily down a good 48 oz of ice water a day.
I have a Brita, but mostly use it to filter water for use in my humidifier and Keurig.
Although our tap water is drinkable, I catch rainwater and drink that - much nicer and purer. I’ve just had a friend staying for a few weeks and she’s been filling the water jugs. I thought she wasn’t washing out the jars very well, turns out on the last day she comments that she’s been filling them from the tap. 
I use a Brita filter on my tap water, but that’s because the water softener in my building makes the water taste salty. It’s so bad, when my mother visits she makes her coffee from the filtered water because she can taste the salt in her coffee.
Our tap water is usually pretty good in the fall, winter and spring, but sometime in the early summer, something happens in the lakes where they draw the water from, and the tap water sometimes gets a distinct ‘dirt’ taste. City of Dallas water isn’t so bad about that, but the surrounding communities, in particular the North Texas Water Authority-served ones, have big problems with it.
quoted for truth, as the kids say (do they still say that?)
Velocity: I knew a guy who got access to a machine that could test with good sensitivity for metals in water. He got a handful of samples of tap water from cities in the Northeast US and ran them through. The highest result he got was from the control sample sent through a Britta filter. (Filters like Britta have lots of silver, because otherwise they’d just be bacteria breeding pits, what with water just sitting there trapped in unwashable filter material).
Of course a little silver won’t hurt you, but neither will a little copper or iron or pretty much anything else in there except lead (if you’re a child). And if it’s municipal tap water, unless you have a specific reason to think there are lead pipes in your house, you’re probably better off drinking tap water (regularly monitored by the EPA) than bottled (maybe, occasionally, loosely monitored by the FDA when they get around to it. Or not.).
“The water was not fit to drink. To make it palatable, we had to add whisky. By diligent effort, I learned to like it.”
Winston Churchill
I don’t drink tap water, but it’s because of the taste.
I will use it my coffee though.