Why bottled water when good tap available?

Note that the nalgene scare is largely debunked.

Eh, I’d just rather drink water from a bottle rather than a glass, for some reason (maybe Freud was right). I just refill the bottle from the tap.

Just my little way of sticking it to the man.

The Wife LOVES Lake Michigan water right out of the tap, and she works downtown. We moved last year to a town with exceptional tap water, so I can’t remember the last time I bought bottled.

Well, I come from a place that has a large billboard welcoming you to our humble little town, proclaiming to have the “Best Drinking Water in Canada”. Some kind of award we won way back when. However, it’s easy enough to believe it, since we have very little industry in our area to pollute our deep wells. I drank water straight from the tap at home - clear, flavourless water.

Then I moved to Seattle. Ugh. I thought all water tasted pretty much the same, but I see I was spoiled. Gross! My in-laws and husband seem to have no problem at all drinking from the tap. I ended up buying a tap filter while we were living in south Seattle, but the water quality was so bad that the filters kept clogging up after a couple of weeks. I wrote to the company (PUR) and explained what was going on to them, and they were very kind, helping me to find a solution. When nothing we tried worked, they sent me a filtering pitcher and some spare pitcher filters for free, saying it worked differently than the tap filters. It works like a charm. The water here in north Seattle seems to be much cleaner, and I only need to change the filter every six months or so, but I can still taste the difference from the tap.

So, filtered water for me. I’m just a spoiled little princess who can taste icky water and feel peas under my mattress. My husband, raised here, has no problem at all drinking the water - but when he visited my parent’s home a couple years ago and I gave him a glass of tap water, he was wondering where the tap filter was, since he couldn’t see it. :smack:

The original water system in the house here had only a softener and a black light. However, we have sulfur reducing bacteria which … you guessed it, make the water smell like rotten eggs. Since the addition of the carbon filter and the osmosis filter, no more rotten egg smell, no more nasty taste, no more bacterial slime.

I do have a chlorinator attached to my water system, but it has nowhere near the level of chlorine that the ‘city water’ supplied out here does. I know that because when the water company came through, my neighbor tapped in. I got a sample of his water, and a sample of mine, right outa the taps, and had both tested.

Mine was cleaner and had less chlorine, so stuck with the well.

I am not paying for the water, but for the bottle–more specifically, for the convenience of a bottle–it’s much easier to grab a cold bottle of water from the fridge than to fuss around with ice and a glass, and if I am leaving, I can take it with me without spilling it all over the place and I don’t have to worry about losing anything anywhere. Can you refill bottles? Of course, but it’s a pain in the ass, and generic bottled water is not that expensive and, honestly, I’ve paid more for less convienience. Furthermore, it’s hard to really wash out the bottles (soap residue always lingers) and I don’t like just rinsing and refilling them more than a couple times–backwash isn’t sterile, so it’s not like the bottle is pristine.

Of course it’s more sensible and better for the enviroment to reuse a plastic bottle from the tap. But that goes for a lot of things most people do–I don’t understand why drinking bottled water is always held up as the epitome of pretension and wastefullness, when it’s no more wasteful than using plastic grocery bags or paper towels, nor more expensive than eating out once a week instead of cooking for yourself.

Maybe that’s it, I don’t know. She has a water softener, but it tends to leave a film on everything. Of course, she’s out in the country (I don’t know how familiar you are with Ligonier).
Now, mind you, I only use bottled water for drinking. For cooking-even making tea, or Kool-Aid or whatever, I just use the tap.

This is pretty much exactly what I think. Water is my drink of preference, so I grab a bottle of water in the same way that others might grab a can of Coke. There’s nothing wrong with my tap water here. Although I have lived places where the tap water tasted bad, our water here tastes fine and is perfectly safe. I cook with tap water and use tap water for my tea and coffee and lemonade or orange juice concentrate. When we sit down to eat supper at night, I fill our water glasses with tap water. I keep a small glass by my sink and, if I’m just thirsty throughout the day, I’ll fill it up from the tab and drink it down while I’m standing at the sink. But if I’m getting a drink to sip on while I’m watching TV or reading, I’ll usually grab one of the bottles of bottled water rather than filling a glass from the tap. It’s just more convenient. I usually buy the WalMart brand filtered water, so it’s not terribly expensive. Less than soda, anyway.

Mine are a bit better than the ones in the bottom picture, but my back teeth are very heavily pitted. Porcelain veneers are an excellent treatment option (I have six on my top front teeth), but they’re expensive. Resin veneers (eight on my lower bottom teeth) are cheaper, but they don’t look quite as realistic and are prone to staining along the edges after several years.

I use a Brita filter. It’s not that I distrust the municipal water, here. Nor that I think that it tastes bad - I just got spoiled in the Navy with nearly pure water, and like that better. I use it for drinking water and for ice, but tap water is fine for cooking/ and drinking if I forget.

When I make ice-cubes out of tap water and then put those cubes in a glass of water & let them melt, I get this ew-ey precipitate melting out of them and collecting at the bottom of my glass.

I make ice-cubes out of my Brita water and I don’t get that.

There’s nothing in my water that’s gonna kill me. But there’s shit in my water I don’t wanna drink.

I just tasted my tap water to see if it was all in my head-nope. It’s plastic-y and metallic tasting. Yech. I’ll stick my my Dannon spring water.

I do make ice cubes with it, though.

I grew up in a town where all of our water was spring fed. When you shower in mountain spring water for the first 17 years of your life, you learn to be fussy. I can tell the difference between filtered, bottled and tap water. I can probably tell you how old the filter was on the filtered, too. I buy bottled water when I’m out and have a water filter at home, because while Toronto’s tap water is drinkable, it’s not good.

Our municipal water is very drinkable–the water company even gives out (empty) bottles that look like bottles you would buy at the store, with a label and everything. Our kids get them at school often, and they sometimes show up at public outdoor events as promotional things.

However, the pipes the water flows through are not always good. My workplace, for example, gets exactly the same water that I do at home (and which we drink on a regular basis), but it’s vile there. We finally talked them into getting us a water cooler, so that we can have drinkable, cold water.

I do occasionally buy bottled water when we are going to be outside for long periods, especially if I can’t find a usable free bottle. However, I do try to keep a couple of empty bottles around or filled in the fridge so I don’t have to buy water on a regular basis.

Plastic bottles taste like plastic. Ugh.
And glass, like Perrier is just a stupid waste of resources. They say “Loook at me, how much I can throw away on nothing!”