My house has a lead pipe from the street to the inside hookup, so I filter drinking water, but not cooking water. The advice was that the only real danger was overnight after it had been sitting in there for a while. So he told me to shower to clean it out before making coffee, and that an automatic ice maker unfiltered would not be a great idea.
Same here. I can’t stand water in any form. I am struggling with finding a drink that doesn’t have citric acid or calories. Diet soda is acidy and so are the water additives that would make it palatable (Crystal Light, etc.). For now I am sticking with diet soda.
While bottled water is vastly overpriced and overhyped (especially supposedly oxygen and electrolyte “enhanced” water), and anyone who has been to an untended beach in the South Pacific Ocean or South China Sea can attest to the massive litter problem of plastic drink containers, there is good reason to view tap water with some degree of scruitiny. Several studies have found significant amounts of contaminants in municipal drinking water supplies and cities with poorly maintained water treatment facilities, and failing infrastructure or contaminants in privately owned water distribution systems may contribute contaminants or harbor harmful organisms themselves. Filtering water for drinking and cooking is a prudent step in many areas (especially areas with high sulphur, perchlorates, food and industrial processing runoff, or where incidential or deliberate intrusion of contaminants into groundwater sources; however not all filters are equally effective or operate as advertised, requiring some amount of research by the user.
“Mandrake, have you ever seen a Commie drink a glass of water?”
Stranger
I’ve drank tap water for 50 years,
I think it was Consumer Reports that found water filters they tested had mold and bacteria in them. That ended any interest I had in buying one.
A couple cites.
http://money.usnews.com/money/blogs/my-money/2012/04/02/6-surprising-health-hazards-lurking-in-your-home
http://www.distillationstation.com/articles/challenges-with-activated-carbon-filters/
<W.C.Fields>Water? Never touch the stuff. Fish fuck in it.</W.C. Fields>
I’ve had people be shocked that I will take a empty water bottle and full it at the tap, they warn me no no no don’t drink that poison!
I roll my eyes.
EDIT:At home we don’t have water service, we have three large tanks and a neighbor loans us a hose twice a week to fill them. This goes into the household plumbing fed by gravity. The tanks are full of algae and moss and stuff that looks like seaweed, my wife refuses to drink it unless it is boiled. I drink it without, never had an issue.
No, probably not, but this Brita plan might turn you into a money sieve. 
Tap water drinker. No plans to change. I’ve read about the filters before and they’re gross, I wouldn’t be vigilant enough about changing them. Especially at work I will skip the Brita pitchers in the fridges, no thanks, who’s in charge of changing those filters? Where are the replacements? No one knows. Yuck. Straight from the tap, thanks.
People who complain about chlorine taste, all they have to do is fill a pitcher and let it sit overnight. Chlorine dissipates and the taste will be gone. No filter needed.
Of course if your home water tastes bad or is unsuitable well water that can’t benefit from a whole house filter, buy what you need. Usually folks in that situation go cheaper routes with 5-gallon service or gallon jugs of distilled, much cheaper.
Lots of municipalities use chloramine, which is much less volatile and can remain in the water for several weeks (unless you use a filter to remove it).
A lot of modern refrigerators have built-in filters with some kind of flow or backpressure sensor to indicate when to change the filter (it’s not just a simple timer).
We use that for a lot of our drinking water; my wife complains about the taste of our water, although I honestly don’t care.
I use a Brita pitcher for water for bread – I’ve had a sourdough starter going for a couple of years, and I try not to give him chlorine.
I have never once drank filtered water that I was aware of or can at least recall. I don’t drink Soda’s…etc so I mostly drink tap water. 38yrs old and still healthy.
This is why the filter in my Brita gets changed every 6-8 weeks.
We have well water, which is tested at least yearly (when they were doing construction in the area it was more frequently). It’s fine from a health standpoint, but it’s got a ton of minerals in it, it doesn’t pour so much as “thunk” and the minerals aren’t wonderful tasting or good for some types of cooking, so we filter it for drinking and cooking.
We really need to swap the filter every two months, minimum. But too many people don’t bother, which is how you get into problems. Read The F’ing Manual, people!
The fact your water tanks have algae, moss, and “seaweed” is actually a sign of it being healthy. Toxic water can be perfectly clear and pretty because nothing can grow in it.
We get that effect in our toilet bowl sometimes we we don’t clean it quite as often as we should, or go away for a week. It’s because there’s all sorts of healthy stuff in the water for things to eat, like the aforementioned minerals.
At work they have switched from five-gallon jugs to a plumbed filtered thingie. Same water cooler base, no jugs.
How do you catch said rainwater? Do not drink ‘rainbarrel’ water caught from a roof - there is bird shit and windblown crap on your roof and in the gutters …
[URL=“http://boards.straightdope.com//www.pinterest.com/pin/create/extension/”]
And lots of “fertilizer”.
But yeah, I don’t think the presence of algae or aquatic plants is a sign of dirty or toxic water, nor do I believe that they’re anything but a benign presence in the tank.
Hell, I worry that because I drink a lot of bottled water I’m not getting the benefit of the fluoridation. I make an EFFORT to drink more tap water.
So basically, I’m the opposite of a fluoridation conspiracy theorist.
Save yourself! Buy bottled water! … which is usually just tap water, from a different tap.
A Brita type filter will make your water taste better, so why not? And altho there may not be lead in a treated municipal system- some old building may have more.
Change your filter and keep the pitcher in the fridge. That way you also have a supply of cold drinking water.