can you drink your water right out of the tap?

[otherone]

I recently moved from the town to the city. I went from well water to municipal water. I can now drink the water directly from the sink.
Do you have well water or municipal water? Can you drink straight from the tap or do you need a filter?

[BainsBane]

1. Yes, and I do

I live in the city. Water quality verifies in different parts of the city but it's okay near me.

[blkmusclmachine]

2. Fracked H2O.

Mmmmm.

[Recursion]

3. I live in a city where waterborne diseases kill 10,000 people a year

I'll stick with distilled...

[KamaAina]

97. In case you're wondering, the city is Mumbai

I did a double-take at that figure until I realized who the poster was.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

4. It's fine here. I drink it right out of the tap, no problem.

[markpkessinger]

5. Yes -- I live in NYC . . .

. . . which a superb system of open air reservoirs upstate in the Catskills that provide abundant fresh, clean water to the city.

[otherone]

10. I live up the river in Newburgh

We get the same un fracked water.

[Graybeard]

16. Yes -- NYC water...the best.

From the tap I fill my water bottles every day. I use it in my

SodaStream and in cooking. Never used any special filters.
.

[MannyGoldstein]

35. I recall NYC water winning in a blind taste test against bottled waters

Many years ago... Consumer Reports, IIRC.

[Boom Sound 416]

61. Best water!

[Skidmore]

6. I do.

Even though we have a filter, I still drink water from the regular tap. We live in a small village and our water comes from a municipal well. We have soft water system for the whole house because the water is so hard that it will gunk up your washer and the plumbing if you don't.

[BlueToTheBone]

86. We have our own well and we use a sediment filter

just to make sure nothing comes up from 765 feet in the earth. The filter lasts about 3 months and shows iron sediment.

[NutmegYankee]

7. Yes, I do

It's a well supply, but tastes fine.

[leftynyc]

8. Absolutely

Municipal water and it's delicious (Westchester County, NY). When I visit friends in Florida, I forget to NOT drink tap water there and wind up with a mouth tasting of sulphur.

[Tx4obama]

9. I can drink water from the tap, BUT...

I use a Britta filtered water pitcher for drinking water.

Years ago I dated a guy from Missouri - we visited his parents 'way out in the country' - their water smelled like ROTTEN EGGS and I threw up when the first time they gave me a glass of water.

Pretty embarrassing

[otherone]

11. that was how my well water was

Now I get nyc water.
Thanks for the reply.

[madokie]

12. Rural water

We can drink from the tap. Although we do have an under sink filter we use for drinking and cooking our water straight from the tap is pretty durn good. Our water comes from one of the better water plants in the country.
We have a well but we don't use it. I plan to use it for watering the garden and such someday but just never have got around to putting a pump in it

[longship]

13. I have a well. I drink out of the tap.

Bottled water is a rip off. In my area it comes from the same aquifer as my well. The stupid people in town buy bottled water not realizing that it's the same stuff as their city water. But it's named Crystal Spring, or something like that. It makes all the difference and people load up their shopping carts with the stuff.

Jesus, people are stupid!

[Recursion]

22. Penn & Teller did a great episode of BS on bottled water

Standing outside of the Safeway asking people to read out where their Dasani says "Source: Atlanta Municipal Water Supply"

[Democracyinkind]

14. I do, it is clean but for hormonal residue, which worries me.

But it's either that or plastics, so it's pretty much lose-lose, pseudohormones from plastics or the real stuff from all the ladies peeing.

[LumosMaxima]

15. I have city water, so I can . . .

but there is too much chlorine in our local water & the smell turns me off, so I prefer distilled.

[Phentex]

20. Same here. It's fine but heavily chlorinated.

At times, the smell is worse than other times.

[Aerows]

76. Ours, too

and we live in the sticks.

[Mariana]

70. If you put it in a jug and leave it in the fridge

for a day or so, uncovered, most of the chlorine will dissipate and the water will taste and smell much better.

[orpupilofnature57]

17. Haven't in 20 yrs

One night

[tom_kelly]

18. Yes

Live in Tampa. I buy no-name brand spring water for drinking at home (.69 a gallon) but I have no problem drinking from water fountains at work.

[cali]

19. Yes. Best water I've ever tasted. It's town water from a spring- gravity fed

[GreenEyedLefty]

21. Yes, we have municipal water that is safe, but at times it reeks of chlorine, so

I buy distilled water by the gallon. I'll take my chances with the plastic, which, BTW is HDPE and does not transmit anything to the drink inside.

[Laelth]

23. Here, we have some of the best-tasting water in the United States.

We drink it straight from the tap in my household.

http://www.wwdmag.com/georgia039s-macon-water-authority-wins-%E2%80%9Cbest-best%E2%80%9D-taste-test

-Laelth

[Recursion]

24. That's one thing I really miss about Austria: the tap water

That was some good water.

[liberal N proud]

25. We can but generally it is filtered through the refrigerator filter.

This time of year, the water gets a funny smell coming from Lake Erie.

[underpants]

26. Yes

Richmond VA

[Hayabusa]

27. Yes, but

I have to stick in the fridge for a while to get it nice and cold.

[LuvNewcastle]

28. The water in my town is fine and I drink it all the time.

Some of the neighboring towns around here have bad water, though. Some of it has sea water in it; it has a fishy smell. Some towns have brownish water, so they have to buy their water for drinking and cooking.

I don't think I'd live in a town with bad water. That's a big priority for me. If the water went bad here, I'd raise hell and organize people to spend whatever the city had to spend to get good water. I don't see why people put up with it.

[FSogol]

29. City water and yes. n/t

[ananda]

30. Yes.

But the lakes here are high and not polluted.

[Buns_of_Fire]

31. I can, but I seldom do.

Our municipal system overchlorinates a little, so I'll run it through a two-year-old Brita filter that only the charcoal part works on anymore. That's enough to remove the swimming-pool taste and make it fit for coffee, when I've run out of genuine Jujube Springs Water (I think it's really from the backyard tap of somebody in Abingdon, where they have a better municipal treatment plant).

Mostly, though, I rely on bottled (or sometimes, canned) water that's been heavily treated with hops and barley (and sometimes wheat) with a little bit of yeast, and aged for at least three or four days.

[HereSince1628]

32. I drink water from the source of the largest waterborne disease outbreak in US history

Although I sometimes drink water from a private well, that was a lucky punch and has very little iron or other off-tasting minerals.

Milwaukee water comes from Lake Michigan, it's chlorinated, fluoridated, and as was the case in the Cryptosporidium outbreak in the 90's it is sometimes contaminated.

But, Milw water pretty much can be trusted to have lower levels of radium than suburban municipal water drawn from wells.

Years ago I drank Waukesha water without looking at the water bill...which in the late 80s and early 90s included a usually never read statement that it did not meet federal safe water standards for radium.

The City of Waukesha (just about 10 miles west of the lake, but 'over the hump' and outside Lake Mich basin) has argued/fought the international commission for permission to buy Lake Michigan water from Milw for years...a classic case-history of conflict over Great Lakes Water.

[B Calm]

33. Well water and we drink straight from the tap!

[no_hypocrisy]

34. Municipal water supplies cannot 100% filter out leftover pharmaceuticals

found in waste water, e.g., blood pressure medication, birth control pills/hormones, antibiotics. At worst, you're getting a cocktail of half-lives of a cornucopia of pills with your tap water. This is the unspoken water pollution.

[Buns_of_Fire]

40. A friend of mine (an environmental engineer) has been warning me about this for years.

We can filter out and/or kill the pathogens and other little beasties, but little can be done about contaminants at the molecular level.

[wercal]

36. Rural water and I don't drink it.

The company I work for does engineering for rural water districts, so people get pretty testy when I tell them my water is no good. Besides taste, we tested it for solids, and it was off the charts bad. MY wife has severe kidney problems, and she can't afford to risk drinking that water.

By my calculation, water is taken out of the river, treated, piped 22 miles to the district that resells it to me, and piped 10 miles from there to my house. That's a lot of time in the lines...and I am on a half mile dead end at the far end of their system.

Also disturbing - the screens in our faucets get clogged with plastic debris. The piping in my house is copper, and I installed my service line with bell and spigot pipe (so I didn't cut it anywhere except once at the end). But somewhere on the system, the district is cutting pipes (I'm assuming wet taps for service lines) and allowing plastic 'sawdust' into the pipes...which is not good to ingest at all.

[MannyGoldstein]

37. Municiple, drinkable. I suspect that all municiple tap water in the People's Republic

of Massachusetts is delightfully potable.

[Art_from_Ark]

90. I can tell you that the water I was drinking

in the Southbridge area definitely was not "delightfully potable".

[MannyGoldstein]

91. Ouch! What was the issue?

I have friends who deal with water stuff, don't know if they have a connection to Southbridge.

[Art_from_Ark]

95. I'm guessing it was high iron content

It was the second most awful tap water I have ever tasted (the worst was Louisiana sulphur water). Couldn't even get a shampoo lather with it.
The mailling address was Southbridge, so I assume it was Southbridge city water. This was back in the late '80s.

[Warren Stupidity]

38. I use a glass, but if desperate, I'll drink straight from the tap.

Bottled water in most first world countries is silly.

[TxDemChem]

39. We've got municipal, but I always filter it

It's very hard and has a slight smell of sulphur. It also leaves behind mineral deposits. I won't even brush my teeth with it, as it smells so bad.

[stonecutter357]

41. under sink filter

Birmingham Al. and we have i think two people missing in the lake we get water from.under sink water filter and a refrigerator water filter

[Lee-Lee]

42. On a well, and it is great.

Just add ice, I like my water cold.

[notadmblnd]

43. We have well water I drink it from the tap

I do prefer city water though. Where I live, you can't go directly from one point to another because of the lakes, it's annoying as hell.

[B Calm]

88. Have you ever chlorinated your well?

It's a good way to get rid of the slime in your water pipes.

[notadmblnd]

92. our water comes from nine muncipal wells in our area

I'm sure that it is chlorinated.

[Brickbat]

44. On a well, and yes.

[Atman]

45. I live on a lake, have a well and a septic tank.

The lake is crystal clear. You can spot a coin 12' down. But it has power boats, and we have a septic system, not city sewer. The combination just makes me a little leery of drinking straight from the tap, although I don't have a problem with brushing teeth or using some for coffee. But we usually filter all our drinking water and keep it in a glass bottle in the fridge. Just to be on the safe side.

[newfie11]

46. Well water straight from tap

Having lived rural for 45 years. This applies to:
Fauquer County, VA
Indian River, MI
Custer Co, SD
Scottsbluff Co, NE

Never had any problems nor our children.

[Nitram]

47. Delicious well water.

I take a bottle to work every day rather than suffer the taste of chlorinated water.

[LWolf]

48. I have a well,

and I get clean, sweet water directly from the tap. I carry it to work with me in gallon jugs so I won't have to drink the crap-tasting city water.

[pintobean]

49. National Drinking Water Database

http://www.ewg.org/tap-water/

Cities with the best water:

Arlington, TX
Providence, RI
Fort Worth, TX
Charleston, SC
Boston, MA
Honolulu, HI
Austin, TX
Fairfax County, VA
St. Louis, MO
Minneapolis, MN



Cities with the worst water:

Pensacola, FL
Riverside, CA
Las Vegas, NV
Riverside County, CA
Reno, NV
Houston, TX
Omaha, NE
North Las Vegas, NV
San Diego, CA
Jacksonville, FL

[KamaAina]

98. Honolulu's down to 6th?

And no NYC in the Top 10?

[otherone]

99. thanks for the link

:-D

[seabeyond]

50. nasty stuff. seems to dehydrate rather than hydrate. i have been able to in other

areas, but not here.

i am so use to bottle or filtered water for a couple decades, now i am weary when i do get out of the area

[Orrex]

51. Well I could, but my wife prefers that I use a glass instead.

[NuclearDem]

52. Can, but prefer not to. I'll stick with the filter.

[Tracer]

53. I criticized my daughter for buying expensive Fiji water...

... when our tap water is perfectly fine.

I told her that there wasn't any difference in taste between the two, and she challenged me to a blind taste test.

So, faced with two glasses of water, I did the test.

Result? There was a difference! Our tap water tasted "flat" and the Fiji water had more -- I don't know -- "zing" or a slight mineral taste.

Still not wasting money on bottled water. I'll drink our "flat" water.

[PD Turk]

54. tastes like shit

but you can live on it...

[bravenak]

55. I drink mine.

It ones out cold and fresh

[badtoworse]

56. My home has municipal water that tastes OK

The fridge has a filter and water from that does taste better. We have a vacation home that uses well water and tastes bad.

[livetohike]

57. We have well water. All of the treatment equipment was in place when we bought the house

so we keep the Iron Master and water softener running. We can drink the water without it. It's fine.

When I go visit my Mom in the suburbs, the water from the tap smells like chemicals and I won't drink it anymore.

[handmade34]

58. fresh spring water here

so good!! My water source... (my town is the home of the 'American Society of Dowsers' and my well was dowsed by one of the best... very fascinating to watch!!)




http://dowsers.org

Water dowsing, then, involves the expansion of your normal expectations to include a new language...that of talking with the Earth. When, during your introduction to water dowsing, you begin accepting that your physical body can, and is now,absorbing energies from the Earth, then you begin to speak this new language.

At your basic dowsing level, then, you have "felt,"-- or been signalled of -- flowing water inside the Earth. But what about the direction of the flow?--and the supply available (gallons per minute)? And how many feet down is this water vein? Before any "drill-rig" existed, most villages had someone who could dowse for a convenient shallow water supply...who wanted to dig for days with just a hand shovel?...Dowsing water , then, is the "grand gateway" through which our country's most gifted dowsers have awakened and learned of their true potential to "divine," and then to apply their innre reading via this gift, which many of us believe is -- a "sacred trust."

These gifts vary far and wide. While water 'divining' teaches us 'pros' the direction of the water flow, the gpm, the water quality and content, plus other aspects of the water that is flowing in any particular vein we dowse, what we really learn is that we are now being attended by a higher power, and our world has become far larger in it's scope...Much Larger.

I have a little place in Florida (used to stay when caring for my Dad) and I use a PUR filter to filter all of the drinking water (if not it smells like the channel water behind the house )

[madrchsod]

59. municipal...

northern illinois aquifer water that`s treated for radon and other bad stuff. the city just spent millions of dollars upgrading it`s water system.

[Javaman]

60. we use a osmosis filtering system in our house.

given the amount of fracking going on in Texas these days, I'm glad we do.

however, given everything I have read, it might not screen everything out.

[MineralMan]

62. Been doing that all my life.

Most bottled water comes out of a municipal water supply, anyhow. Maybe a little filtration, but that's about it.

I don't have a well. I do, actually, but it's been plugged (a legal requirement here in the city of St. Paul.)

[MineralMan]

63. If you have municipal or other treated water,

go on the water treatment plant tour. It's educational and will give you confidence in the quality of your local water. Call the water supplier and ask when you can have a tour.

[Marrah_G]

64. We have good municipal water here.

[ejpoeta]

65. we have well water but cannot because it has so much iron in it.

We have a water softener and an RO unit. Been waiting for city water to come down our road. I grew up with well water and generally prefer it to city water, but in this case I can't wait for it. I wish it wasn't necessary, but it sucks when we run out of drinkable water and I have to go buy it. The RO unit makes a gallon or two an hour.

[1-Old-Man]

66. Well, lots of iron, I'm drinking a glass of it right now

[RC]

67. I never drink from the tap.

I use a glass.

[HappyMe]

68. We have great tap water here.

I never buy bottled water.

[oldhippie]

69. I RO my drinking and coffee water .....

I have a large, high capacity RO/De-ionizing water filter system for my salt water reef aquariums. We also use it to process water for drinking and especially for the fancy-dancy espresso/coffee machine. It keeps us from having to service the coffee machine filters and de-ionizing process more often. The city tap water is fine for everything else.

[Throd]

71. Tap? Hell, I drink right out of the garden hose. (when my wife isn't looking)

[politicat]

72. Yes, municipal but top of the watershed.

Our tap water is a combination of mountain spring and snowmelt. The city is very, very good at keeping it clean, and there's just not that much up hill to worry about.

I even have a little adapter that turns one of the bathroom faucets into a water fountain, which makes brushing and quick drinks a lot easier (as well as making it easier to fill a water bottle, or the plant mister or the reservoir for my iron). It is high in dissolved minerals -- mostly calcium and potassium, if I recall the annual water report.

For the most part, I use the through-the-door refrigerator tap.

That's one of the best parts about living here -- I grew up in Phoenix-metro, which has wretched tasting water. We used those filtration vending machines or the reverse-osmosis water and ice stores from the time they started popping up.

[tabbycat31]

73. I can and often do

I grew up on NYC water, which is awesome water!

The place I'm staying now has a fridge with a built in water filter (you get your water from the fridge door cold). I also travel with a Brita pitcher.

I hate the bottled water industry and prefer not to support it. When I'm on the road I literally fill my metal water bottle with ice from convenience stores, etc.

[GoCubsGo]

74. Municipal water...

And, it's clean water, if one is to believe the reports the city sends every so often. It tastes and smells good, and is soft, so no mineral deposits in the sinks and tubs. It's one of the few good things about this hellhole where I live.

[Aerows]

75. No

too much chlorine, but after it has been filtered by the refrigerator, it's fine.

I'd prefer that over St. Bernard Parish that has brain eating amoeba because they didn't put enough chlorine in the water. That's not very far from where I am ... it's adjacent to my county.

I'll be overjoyed to use a filter rather than have something eat the brains of myself and loved ones.

[RebelOne]

77. I could if I had to, but I prefer to use a Pur filter. n/t

[Aerows]

78. St. Bernard Parish

Next door. Didn't use enough chlorine, got brain eating amoeba in the water supply.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/12/us/louisiana-brain-amoeba-water-supply/index.html

[La Lioness Priyanka]

79. yes

[Brother Buzz]

80. Yes, and I do

When I first moved to my community, the municipal well water wasn't even chlorinated. Unfortunately, they started adding it about twenty years ago even though the test results they send me indicate we still have some pretty good quality water, for ground water.

[JCMach1]

81. Florida Spring water (untainted version)

available only if you live in an Aquifer re-charge area.

[Historic NY]

82. Yes, it tapped from the NYC aqueduct...

sometimes my town has to disconnect and we get "fish water" from one of the local man-made city water lakes.

[ohheckyeah]

83. I could but we have a filter for the whole house....

but it's great tasting well water.

[gopiscrap]

84. as of now, yes.

[bunnies]

85. Only if I hold my nose.

The sulphur-metal taste isnt really my thing. Every now and then its ok, but we never know when that'll be. You can smell the water before you taste it. Its city water & its gross.

[MFM008]

87. no

you have to let it run several minutes to clear the metal/rust rot smell. Plus when it drips it stains orange. water may be good but pipes are old/ rotting.

[gollygee]

89. It tastes horrible

at least to me. It might just be subjective.

[bluestate10]

93. Yes. My state's water has repeatedly been rated highest quality for taste and purity. nt

[Maeve]

94. Can but prefer it filtered

Pur filter on the faucet, tastes better.

[etherealtruth]

96. Yes I do (Metro Detroit)

I did find the municipal water in the DC area to be almost undrinkable