What's in the water? It tastes great!

August 1, 2018 1:53 PM

Bottled, filtered or straight from the tap? With or without additives? When picking a water, even "healthy" water, it's largely a matter of taste (NPR). In most of the U.S., municipal water is as healthy as other commercial water sources, and the biggest concern is due to lead pipes, and NPR has an app a step-by-step guide for that. This is all very focused on municipal water in the United States, so let's turn to the CDC to learn more about other water contaminants, how to identify and mitigate them, with a focus on private wells.
posted by filthy light thief (28 comments total)

See also: Water quality around the world (last updated: 2014/10/23), reported as part of the U.N.'s Water For Life Decade that ended 3 years ago (2005-2015).
posted by filthy light thief at 1:57 PM on August 1, 2018

I miss the taste of good ol' Schuylkill Punch. New York City tap water tastes fine, but it's just not the same as home.
posted by SansPoint at 2:03 PM on August 1, 2018 [4 favorites]

Most bottled water is municipal water with an extra filter. It isn't anything special.

My company has a water cooler that people use all the time. When ever it runs out, it is an emergency where the office manager leaves to pick up more. It is 10 feet from a tap. I don't get it. The bottle refills also cost a lot of money. It is to the point where we should just have a fridge with a filter and we'd be out ahead in no time. People are so weird about their water.

(On preview - I'm not talking about people being weird about lead in their water. I'm talking about people going to a cooler to make coffee when there is a tap right there.)
posted by Monday at 2:13 PM on August 1, 2018 [4 favorites]

I just discovered "organic tree water" which is organic because it was first passed through a tree, extracted as sap, and then reverse osmosed to become more or less just water again. And then they add some organic flavoring and sell it in a can.

It tasted nice enough, but I'm sure it would have been just fine if it had come from a decent municipal water supply.
posted by BungaDunga at 2:18 PM on August 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

Honestly, even though there's no topping current politics in this regard ...

The thing that made me just give the fuck up on the human race was the successful commercialization of bottled water that started in the mid/early-00s.
posted by Dashy at 2:19 PM on August 1, 2018 [3 favorites]

Bottled water has its place.

Its place is not in your refrigerator at home, though, unless you've got real problems with your home's tap water supply.
posted by SansPoint at 2:21 PM on August 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

I just discovered "organic tree water" which is organic because it was first passed through a tree, extracted as sap, and then reverse osmosed to become more or less just water again. And then they add some organic flavoring and sell it in a can.

For all you know this is just condensate from boilers for maple syrup production. Or I guess they use RO to concentrate sap before boiling to save energy, so it was maybe just that. But my guess would be it's just maple syrup byproduct.
posted by GuyZero at 2:27 PM on August 1, 2018 [2 favorites]

Of course. But seeing people buy it by the case, everywhere -- there are aisles dedicated to it now in every grocery store! Water! In bottles!

Nestle and Coke et al. have successfully convinced the public that 1) tap water is full of toxins! and electrons! and dihydrogen monoxide! and b) bottled water is © Medical-Grade Certified Purity ©

And don't get me started on bottled water in national parks.

Bottles, bottles everywhere.
posted by Dashy at 2:28 PM on August 1, 2018 [5 favorites]

I'm lucky to be in Maine, I get my water from Portland Water District, who get it from Sebago Lake. It is so clean it needs only the barest treatment, and it tastes good. It's some of the best water of anywhere. But people use a bubbler, or buy water bottled in plastic that may leach chemicals that disrupt hormones. Because there's an entire industry and culture that has taught people that expensive stuff is better, that stuff you buy is better, that Nature needs to be tweaked, or, in the case of that 'raw' Live Water bozo, utterly untweaked.

Pretty much all the water on the planet has been here, as water, for a long time. It's been up and down in clouds and earth. It's been in and out of oceans and plants and critters. It's the stuff that makes life possible here on our planet, which is pretty because of the water. But, sure, go ahead and screw it up, privatize it, own it, monetize it. See how that works out. Ask Flint.

Also, I am now entering geezerhood, and get to say this: when I was younger, we were able to leave the house, play, work, walk, etc., without carrying water. Water fountains. Or you were a little thirsty, so when you got home you drank a couple glasses of water from the tap. It was fine.
posted by theora55 at 2:34 PM on August 1, 2018 [5 favorites]

There's a big move away from (plastic) bottled water in the UK and a campaign to get more people drinking tap water when out and about (there isn't particularly a culture of drinking bottled water at home). See https://www.refill.org.uk/
posted by plonkee at 2:46 PM on August 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

I live in the south bay/peninsular area north of San Jose. I'm right on the border between getting my water from the SF water district (Hetch Hetchy etc) and the Santa Clara Valley water district which is mostly ground water.

The water here is so. soft. It's nearly purified water.

I use a CPAP machine with a heated humidifier and if I go somewhere else I can detect the mineral buildup in the water tank in a day or so. I use straight tap water in my cpap machine (yes, I know, I'm not supposed to) for months and zero mineral buildup.

My wife has a kettle in her school classroom which is in the Santa Clara water district. She brings it home twice a year and there a slight but noticeable mineral buildup. (nothing compared to really hard water). But doing nothing but running our tap water through it actually dissolves the mineral build up. It's nuts. So. soft. Beyond soft.

Tap water is a fucking miracle y'all.

(ok yeah all we had to do was flood one of the most beautiful valleys in America to get it, which sucks, but it's done now, so yay mountain runoff water)
posted by GuyZero at 3:02 PM on August 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

Schuylkill punch is the stuff they drink in Philly, I presume? I could not enjoy sodas from fountains in restaurants and hotels in Philly because of the amount of chlorine in the water.
posted by Akke at 3:03 PM on August 1, 2018

For 10 minutes for each tap each day (we use 7 total around the house), run the cold water at full blast, working from the front to the back of the house.

I imagine that as a Californian, this must leave you cringing with discomfort the whole time it's running...
posted by Lexica at 3:05 PM on August 1, 2018

There's an ice machine in the break room at work with an (unchilled, how weird is that) water spout built in. They're both on a filter; the filter is changed so infrequently that the water spout flow rate is pathetic.

I get ice in my nalgene bottle from the machine, then take two steps to the right and fill the rest of the bottle from the kitchen sink.

I'm one of the engineers. People at work know I can explain all kinds of weird sciencey stuff, and I'm a bit of a weirdo. They likely expect me to be a little tin-foil-hat-ish. So about once a week, when I fill up from the sink, I get a weird look, like I'm the last person they'd expect to use straight tap water. I shoot 'em a weird look right back.

St. Louis water is delicious. Fuck bottled water.
posted by notsnot at 5:19 PM on August 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

I also sent an email to the neighborhood mailing list about it this morning, because I was worried they'd notice and think poorly of me. :)

We lived in Kensington (Berkeley hills for those who don’t know the area) for a couple of years and one of my routines was to walk the dog up and down the public paths and stairways that snake up and down the hillsides and between houses and yards. One afternoon we stumbled across a handwritten note on a high wooden gate: “Hi neighbors! We only use low flow drip irrigation for our garden. Please contact us first to discuss before notifying EBMUD. Sincerely, your neighbor.”
posted by notyou at 5:38 PM on August 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

If they can remove the chlorine taste from water then I'll stop buying bottled for home. Hell even some places that have ice in the soda tastes so strongly of chlorine.
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 8:24 PM on August 1, 2018

So I moved to CA from MA a year ago. Still not used to the tap water. I figured I'd get used to the chlorine taste. I have not.

When I travel to my homeland, I practically chug tap water. I worry I'm no longer getting enough fluoride.
posted by es_de_bah at 9:55 PM on August 1, 2018

Peoria had gloriously mineralized water (from a natural spring), and people bitched about it not tasting bland enough, and I was so grumpy about it, I was like, "If this were Europe, people would have been coming to take the waters since the 1750s, and these days we'd be selling the mineral water for $5 a bottle," but because it was America it was just a lot of whining about the water not tasting bland enough. But it was so delicious with all its minerals!
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 10:10 PM on August 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

If they can remove the chlorine taste from water then I'll stop buying bottled for home. Hell even some places that have ice in the soda tastes so strongly of chlorine.

Fun water fact: Dutch tap water generally has no secondary disinfection (residual chlorine/chloramine) added post treatment. Of course, this requires a pretty new distribution network to be safe which means Dutch tap water is expensive.
posted by atrazine at 3:29 AM on August 2, 2018

If they can remove the chlorine taste from water then I'll stop buying bottled for home. Hell even some places that have ice in the soda tastes so strongly of chlorine.

You can buy a Brita pitcher for ~$20 and get at least 40 gallons of water per filter that doesn't taste like chlorine while wasting a lot less plastic on bottled water. At my grocery store, a gallon of water is usually 99 cents, so that's half as expensive and a lot less wasteful.
posted by hydropsyche at 3:45 AM on August 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

I've lived in a lot of different places with different water, and it is pretty noticeable, especially when you've just moved. In Germany, we drank only bottled water and boiled all the water before cooking, but I don't know if that was just our housing or standard everywhere.
In the central west of NSW, the water was allegedly safe but tasted terrible, which is something I've had corroborated by others from the area or visiting.
Here on the state coast, the tap water is delicious and safe, and I think of it as the best, but I don't know if it's actually good or that's just a narrative of Aussie exceptionalism.

I do think that wide availability of free potable water is a human right though. How much would it cost and how much would it help to do even more for water availability, especially during summer? Heatwaves are only going to get worse, and death counts will continue to rise unless we take action.
posted by AnhydrousLove at 4:56 AM on August 2, 2018

If they can remove the chlorine taste from water

A fun water thing from my area - most of the metro area is serviced by the MWRA and the water comes from western Massachusetts. Except Cambridge, which supplies its own water from a series of reservoirs in and around town. The difference in quality is striking (and by "quality" here I mean taste and mineral content, not safety). I work in Cambridge and live in the next town over, and the water in the office is almost undrinkable given how chlorinated it is.

A friend of ours is big in to coffee and is working with a startup building high end espresso machine parts. One of their customers uses Cambridge water for testing because it's so chlorinated and so hard; it's among the worst water in the world for coffee machine components.
posted by backseatpilot at 5:46 AM on August 2, 2018

... it is pretty noticeable, especially when you've just moved...

One of my favorite market stands from a decade or so back was the one sponsored by the municipal water supply. This was upstate NY, where neighboring districts were serviced from slightly different sources - some from one fork of a river, others from another; some from close to the lake, others up the hill; etc. The presentation was just a tap water tasting: drink the 5 or 6 different waters and rank them on smell/flavor/whatever. It was shocking just how noticeable the differences were even though the sources were within miles of one another.
posted by ptfe at 6:01 AM on August 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

Schuylkill Punch is indeed Philly water, and I only notice the taste if, as was mentioned, I have been away. if you drink it regularly it tastes just fine, as does municipal water in most places.

I find the fetishization of plastic-bottled water horrifying.
posted by Peach at 1:11 PM on August 2, 2018

I grew up with Louisiana tap and well water (which is regularly high in sulfer and stinks).

I live in Chicago and by god the tap is glorious.

GLORIOUS

And I cannot get over that the tap water is cold. It's been ten years and I am still joyful over this. It's cold.

After 80 degree stinky tap, it's like science fiction come to life.
posted by AlexiaSky at 4:38 AM on August 3, 2018 [2 favorites]

A cliche from the days when I used to go abroad (from the UK) with my family was admonitions not to drink the tap water in other countries.

Do holidaymakers to the UK from elsewhere ever receive the same advice?
posted by entity447b at 6:01 AM on August 3, 2018

Yes - you would be advised not to drink tap water in eg Turkey, or the Dominican Republic. (Both reasonably popular tourist destinations from the UK.) People buy bottled water when they go to Spain but I can't remember seeing any advice not to drink it. It's been more than 20 years since people in the UK were told to be worried about the tap water in France.
posted by plonkee at 11:39 AM on August 3, 2018

i know approximately five things about municipal water systems but one thing I do know, for sure, is that it benefits a ton from centralization and density

The cost of water treatment per gallon is not insignificant, but the cost per foot of underground pipe is a much bigger deal. Installation, monitoring, maintenance, and pumping, all scale per foot. So as you attach more and more customers to the same mile of pipe, it becomes cheaper and cheaper per person to get the water to them, and you have more money left over for the actual water treatment. So city water tends to actually be quite good. Or at least, it tends to be well treated, because they have more money to devote to treatment. (The Philly Water Dept, where I interned many years ago, doesn't need any subsidies from the city. They're entirely funded by revenue.)

It's middle-density areas, like suburban neighborhoods, that tend to have the worst water, because they have all the pollution of industrialized areas (and cars etc.) and less budget to address it.

So this stereotype about city water has always confused me terribly, because even as a child visiting New York City I could tell it just wasn't true. I have three hypotheses:

a) Much like the stereotype about crime rates, this is left over from the era of white flight. i.e. the water was bad in the '70s or so and no one has updated their assumptions.

b) When people say "city" they mean "large factory town"

c) suburban racists with shitty water assume everything in the city is automatically worse than their neighborhood.

your thoughts.
posted by Rainbo Vagrant at 2:25 PM on August 3, 2018 [1 favorite]