Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I doubt if there is a place in the United States where the public water supply needs to be treated at home in order to be safe to drink. If you have a well, the county extension agent will test it. Your own well might have some agricultural or industrial chemical runoff affecting it, but almost certainly not any harmful pathogens.
Turn on the faucet and drink a half a gallon of tap water every day, you will live to be 100 unless something else kills you. If you find the taste of straight water offensive, add a capful of cheap generic lemon juice per quart.
Get a printout from your city or town's dept of public works to see what is in your water and buy a filter based upon that information. Any simple charcoal filter will take out chlorine and you can look at the info with the fridge water filter to see what that takes out other than chlorine. If that list matches up with what your town says is in the water, you're fine. Just change the filter when it needs changing.
If there's something really dangerous in your water, your city or town has to notify you--I've lived in several towns that had that happen. There isn't much really totally clean perfect water left in this country--said by my ex brother in law who worked for the water and soil conservation service. He always filtered their water, knowing what he knew.
Whole house filters are really expensive, hard to dispose of the charcoal once it's used and expensive to buy more. Also, some of the contaminants are volatile and will escape anyway. When any charcoal filter gets used up, it will release whatever contaminants are trapped in it--not a very safe thing to happen as you will be exposed to all of them at once.
We have used two major brands of filter, Brita and Pur, the type of filtering depending upon what our town's water department showed. The Brita pitcher rates really well for drinking water and we got the Pur when our town had a water drinking ban due to some contaminant that the Brita didn't address.
If your fridge has a water filter, that's usually pretty good. You can even go online and look up what it filters if you don't have the booklet that came with the fridge.
We used to have a tank under the kitchen sink to filter the water rather than have a little thing on the faucet that you would turn on and off. The trick with all filters is to CHANGE the filter. A water dept person told me this. A lot of people think they are getting their money's worth by making the filter last and last when really, once it's filled up, it will release everything it has trapped right back into your water all at once. Not what you want.
You will save more in the long run by purchasing a good quality water filter and just filtering your own tap water. Also there are no standards for what is in the bottled water that some people buy. Sometimes it's just tap water put into bottles.
Yes, sometimes it's just tap water in the bottles. The ones that say "filtered water" or "distilled" water...have filtered, or distilled, tap water. Those -are- the standards. Spring water has to actually come from springs or aquifers. It's a matter of truth in advertising, and companies have been forced to change their labels to reflect this truth, when any mistruth was discovered and reported.
In Florida, years ago, there used to be filtration machines outside gas stations. You'd bring a jug and place it under the spigot, put in a quarter, and filtered water would come out and fill the jug. Back at that time, the tap water was not safe to drink, and the only options were to buy expensive spring water, boil your own water, buy bulky filters that fit under your faucet (making it nearly impossible to wash your dishes), or buy the water from those machines. I know that tap water in Florida typically smells and tastes like crap, even if it's coming out of a filter built into your refrigerator. New York City water is the only tap water I'd ever willingly drink, because it has no smell or aftertaste even if it isn't run through a filter at the user's end.
I drink spring water, because I like the taste of it. And yes, it really does come from an aquifer, it is not just tap water put into bottles.
We have been distilling our own drinking/cooking water for several years with the Waterwise. We eat a healthy diet and have zero health issues. If you could see the crud in the bottom of the distiller after distilling just one gallon...............
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
