This question is obviously intended for those that live in places where tap water is “safe to drink.”
I live in Southern California, where I’m at the end of a long chain of cities. Occasionally, the tap smells of sulfur, hardness changes, or it tastes… odd. I’m curious about the perspective of people that are directly involved and their reasoning.
Water and Wastewater operator here. In Texas, where I work and live water is sampled, tested, and reported to TCEQ the Texas specific extension of the EPA. If a water system continually fails to meet water quality standards set out by TCEQ, that system will be taken over by TCEQ and brought back into compliance. All this to say, yes, I drink it because I help make it.
w/ww op in canada. ditto
I live in Grand Rapids, MI where the tap water is 2.4 ppt PFAS. I buy reverse osmosis purified from the store for $0.50 a gallon for drinking, and will continue to do so until I get my own place where I’ll install an under-sink one
The water is pretty solid in a lot of developed countries. If it tastes bad then it might have to do with the pipes and tubing.
If you have any reason to suspect the quality of your water, get it tested! It’s not that expensive, you just ship a sample to a lab and they email you a report. Because so many people depend on well water there’s a bunch of labs all over the country that do water quality testing, it’s a relatively cheap and accessible service.
Unless you need a full pathogen panel, you can just buy the tests for pretty much anything at hardware stores. There are kits that include several.
I live in Minnesota. Close to Minneapolis. My brother does testing for swimming pools. He tested the city water for contaminates. He says do not drink it. If the level of chlorine in the city water was in pool water the pool would be shut down. It would not be safe to even swim in it. Yet the city claims it’s safe to drink.
I’m going to message my brother to get a better answer of what I just replied with. My answer still needs more clarification
I’m going to do my best to explain this.
When a pool is tested to see if chlorine needs to be added (if there are impurities) they will typically add free chlorine. The free chlorine will combine with the impurities. The odor that you smell when you go to a pool is the free chlorine evaporating out. but some of the chlorine will stay in the pool as combined chlorine. it combined with the impurities.
After a while there isn’t enough chlorine in the pool and the impurities build back up.
Repeat the process.
The real problem is when you get to much combined chlorine in a pool. The health authorities will tell you to either fix it or close it.
How do you get rid of combined chlorine? You add free chlorine with will break the combined chlorine.
The combined chlorine can cause health issues. (that is why the health authorities will tell you to fix it). usually a good pool maintainer will detect the issue and just fix it before a notice is handed over.
Now our city puts chlorine into the drinking water to get rid of impurities (in laymans terms : the bad things in the water you don’t want to drink). We used to put free chlorine into the drinking water.
The nice thing was they would add the free chlorine it would get rid of the impurities and most of the free chlorine would just go away. (evaporate) .
the down side? we kept having to add more and more (that was expensive.
some genius decided to switch from free chlorine to combined chlorine for the drinking water. combined DOESN’T go away by itself. you have to break combined chlorine.
the benefit was it cost a LOT less doing it this way.
the downside is you shouldn’t be drinking combined chlorine. Think about it. if there is to much combined chlorine in the pool and it’s listed as unsafe to swim in , then why would be it safe to drink it? to fix food in it? to bath in it ? to take a shower in it? it’s illogical.
yet that is exactly what the city did.
i hope that i got that explained correctly.
prolonged exposure to combined chlorine can lead to asthma, allergies and other health issues
Sure, that all makes sense, but it’s still anecdotal.
I’m not a chemist, but “combined chlorine” from what I read is also known as “Chloramine”. Going from there, I went to both Minneapolis and St Paul’s water supply. I couldn’t fine chloramine levels for St Paul but Minneapolis does have it, and it’s listed at 3.9ppm.
Now, knowing that, I went to the EPA to figure out what a safe level was, and turns out they have an entire page about this mostly due to fear mongering and misinformation. In fact they have a blurb describing exactly what you’re talking about:
Many public water systems (PWSs) use chlorine as their primary disinfectant. However, some PWSs changed their secondary disinfectant to chloramines to meet disinfection byproduct requirements. Since then, consumers have raised questions about this switch in disinfection.
From the EPA’s basic information site, The drinking water standard for chloramines is 4 parts per million (ppm) measured as an annual average.
They also included a full scientific study on how it affects us, if you’re good with it I’d suggest reading up.
It also looks like the EPA and most cities started doing this back in the 1930s, so this is not a new thing Minneapolis just started doing, it’s actually been standard practice for a while.
By pure luck you got someone who’s SO worked for years making pool testing kits, and I asked them about this. They said:
Sure, it can be an issue, and what they’re saying is true, but the combined chlorine isn’t really the issue. The bigger worry is that it easily binds to create carcinogens, so they check regularly to make sure both levels are low. We had machines that had automated sensors monitoring both to make sure they stayed in safe levels, it’s very regulated at the municipal level.
If this is what you meant by “impurities”, then yes, they track carcinogens extremely closely. They also have automated testers constantly running verifying that the water that passes through is safe.
Both St Paul and Minneapolis post their carcinogen numbers, and they are both well within safety parameters.
So, again, I am not a chemist, but this is one of those things that I have extreme skepticism on when someone says we don’t have safe tap water. Our tap water is one of the only things I trust about governments because I know what happens when it doesn’t work, and when it doesn’t work we really know it doesn’t work.
And hey, even if it is flying under the radar, you can buy kits to test them, my SO confirmed it’s a pretty standard test and would show as failed immediately. If it did fail, from what I’ve read and what my SO tells me, you wouldn’t be here, you wouldn’t just be drinking bottled water, you’d be going to the press about it.
So, this stuff sounds really scary when you first read it. Hell, when I read what you said my stomach dropped, but then I thought “wait a minute, let’s find out for sure”. And by reading into it, I found out a lot of neat information and learned more about water treatment. So my main take away is that we need to stop believing what our friend told us and listen to the actual scientists. Things like water treatment sound really scary when we don’t understand that science behind it, but that’s the cool thing, we can let them. Passing on information we haven’t vetted ourselves is a dangerous thing as we’ve learned over the last few years. It’s on us to go personally validate if what we hear is true.
thank you for posting your information. and i will take some time to read through it.
also the guy i got this info from is one of the smartest individuals that i know (my brother). he has the ability to understand information in a way that many will miss.
does that mean that he is perfect? nope. he has made mistakes. and i will bring this up to him to see what he says.
but with the fact that he has tested the water, while i’m not going to blindly trust him. it does still make me concerned.
again i will bring this info to him. it should be an interesting conversation.
unrelated note here, but it will help you to understand his ability to look at things : when he messed up his heal of his foot. several doctors said there is nothing that you can do. it’s permanent. he didn’t like their answers, there was something in how they answered that just said “keep digging” . so he kept digging. he found out that if nothing is done (and time was running out) then it would be a life long issue … he would (if I remember right) he would lose permanent feeling in the heal.
he kept doing research and calling people. he found a doctor in the cities. the doctor works on Minnesota Vikings players who had the same injury. the doctor said if he operates soon. it could be fixed. it got fixed. no issues at this point.
again i’m not saying my brother is perfect, please don’t think that i am saying that he is.
he’s definitely been wrong before. but with his ability to look at things in a different way and to not give up. he’s found answers where others said there were none. he’s found problems where others have missed the issue.
again thank you for the information.
edit: there are very few people i trust at the level that i trust my brother. it’s the only reason i’m going to keep digging after you gave me the info.
I think hey are talking about the chloramine that Minneapolis uses to disinfect. It is more stable and isn’t just chlorine, so it would be in a “combined” result. The levels are page three of this report https://www2.minneapolismn.gov/media/content-assets/www2-documents/residents/2022-Consumer-Confidence-Report-FINAL.pdf It looks like 2023 isn’t posted yet, but I doubt it changes much year to year.
I just learned about this, was kind of a fun dive! I just wrote up a big comment below with my findings, and you’re exactly right, it’s at perfectly safe numbers.
Either way, important to call out misinformation. I don’t think this person did it on purpose, but their facts are definitely only partial, it took some research to get the whole picture.
Nice work on the write up! It is hard sorting things out when they’re half true. For me, drinking water is especially important to get the fact straight on because of how bad it can go if the system fails. It would be silly to disregard anyone saying water wasn’t up to a safe standard, but separating things I would care about out from the fluoride and chlorine background noise is tricky. Thanks for the deeper dive!
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I’m going to do my best to explain this.
When a pool is tested to see if chlorine needs to be added (if there are impurities) they will typically add free chlorine. The free chlorine will combine with the impurities. The odor that you smell when you go to a pool is the free chlorine evaporating out. but some of the chlorine will stay in the pool as combined chlorine. it combined with the impurities.
After a while there isn’t enough chlorine in the pool and the impurities build back up.
Repeat the process.
The real problem is when you get to much combined chlorine in a pool. The health authorities will tell you to either fix it or close it.
How do you get rid of combined chlorine? You add free chlorine with will break the combined chlorine.
The combined chlorine can cause health issues. (that is why the health authorities will tell you to fix it). usually a good pool maintainer will detect the issue and just fix it before a notice is handed over.
Now our city puts chlorine into the drinking water to get rid of impurities (in laymans terms : the bad things in the water you don’t want to drink). We used to put free chlorine into the drinking water.
The nice thing was they would add the free chlorine it would get rid of the impurities and most of the free chlorine would just go away. (evaporate) .
the down side? we kept having to add more and more (that was expensive.
some genius decided to switch from free chlorine to combined chlorine for the drinking water. combined DOESN’T go away by itself. you have to break combined chlorine.
the benefit was it cost a LOT less doing it this way.
the downside is you shouldn’t be drinking combined chlorine. Think about it. if there is to much combined chlorine in the pool and it’s listed as unsafe to swim in , then why would be it safe to drink it? to fix food in it? to bath in it ? to take a shower in it? it’s illogical.
yet that is exactly what the city did.
i hope that i got that explained correctly.
and yes i can forsee a class action lawsuit.
prolonged exposure to combined chlorine can lead to asthma, allergies and other health issues
Are you talking about using chloramine in disinfection? I think conflating pool water and drinking water standards is a bit of a mistake. Things get added to pools from people’s bodies after chlorination that cause weird combined results. Drinking water is disinfected (chlorinated) as a final step. I would object to my municipality using chloramine, but not because I wouldn’t drink it.
I love in NZ, most places in the country have good tap water, sometimes slightly over chlorinated.
most places in the country have good tap water
Except when it doesn’t.
https://www.dia.govt.nz/Government-Inquiry-into-Havelock-North-Drinking-Water
But it’s rare. This example comes from 8 years ago.
The fda tests bottle water. The epa tests tap water. The standards for the fda are lower than the epa. You’re being bambozzled.
How exactly? /s
I never said what I thought in any direction. I simply stated some leading observations without conclusions about their meaning.
Once upon a time I worked for an asphalt company as an operator at the plants and rock quarry. When the test inspector showed up, so did the test and inspection mix running through the plant.
That is why I asked in the way this post was worded. I am looking for someone(s) like myself that are experienced and perhaps smart enough to read between the lines of corruption. It is an unlikely person(s) to find here.
Discovering the various perspectives, along with the spectrum of Lemmy that engages with this post are also interesting from a couple of angles.
The water characteristics you’re worried about sound like aesthetic problems, which might be displeasing but pose no real health risks. These vary significantly between public water systems. If the system pulls from surface water, the water might need more treatment in the dry season since contaminants concentrate in surface waters more that time of year. I’m lucky to live somewhere that has no noticeable taste/odor/color issues. For places that do, you should be able to drink it from tap without issue, but it might taste/smell better if you run it through a filter or even just let it sit in a pitcher in the fridge.
If a municipality were to cut corners with their water treatment in a similar way to the asphalt plant you mentioned (which sounds kinda shady btw), people would get sick and potentially die. Most municipalities are very risk averse and take liability seriously to avoid litigation/losing money. So, it’s not impossible, but I think it’d be unlikely for a city to skimp on water treatment just to save a few bucks. Water treatment facilities are also required to constantly test for things like pH, turbidity, and chlorine residual and report to the state, so it’s not as simple as hiding things from an inspector the day of.
The asphalt company is basically all of Los Angeles’ roads. They came up with a way to use recycled asphalt grindings in a MUCH higher percentage of the mix in a process that involved soaking it with diesel fuel for a specific amount of time and mixing it. The loader operator feeding the plant had just enough down time to do the soak and mixing process. This recycled grindings mix was added to the hot aggregate strait out of the drum burner right at the liquid asphalt mixing point. If I recall correctly (after two decades), the allowed limit for recycle was 15% according to the state, but they were able to run between 30%-45% recycle with their methods and it was undetectable in the company engineering test lab. You be the judge of how that falls into corruption versus innovation.
Interesting, thanks for the context. I don’t know anything about asphalt, but if it didn’t cause any health or safety issues I’d place it on the innovation end of the spectrum. I’d be interested in things like how the spent diesel fuel was disposed of and if any petro chems would leach into stormwater from asphalt made this way.
Diesel fuel is the primary solvent of the liquid “AC” they called it aka the black stuff. For instance, you get any hot AC on you, you’re in big trouble because it is super hot, but on your clothing or a spill, the only way to get it cleaned up is with diesel fuel. There are stages of containment around the storage of the stuff. As far as recycle, it is just enough diesel to wet the old AC in the grindings. There is no excess. It has to be wet for the new and old to mix. The operator is wetting the surface well then feeding the aggregate bins for the plant. Each time they feed a bin, they scoop and drop the recycle grindings. Every 4-5 times, they add a scoop to the conveyer bin, put a fresh scoop on the back of the stall, and soak the mix in diesel. The diesel doesn’t penetrate very deep and the point is to keep it consistent. That area is in the second containment zone for AC, so it is not a part of the groundwater environment. Spending a fortune on wasted diesel is also not the point. Feeding the plant is a monotonous routine. Dialing in these kinds of this is all the mental stimulation there is really. The whole job is, service the machine as needed, don’t spin the tires, and NEVER let a aggregate bin go empty or put the wrong class in the wrong bin.
Get an undersink reverse osmosis and uv filter kit. Some come with a remineralizer so it doesn’t taste flat. Don’t go for a cheap one or it will leak. SoCal isn’t known for its water purity or consistancy.
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As mentioned already you can get it tested for safety. Plenty of water that has the features you described is indeed safe for consumption. But do you really want to? Most of us don’t drink enough water, and if it’s unpleasant you’ll end up drinking a bare minimum. I can’t say enough good things about installing an RO system. It makes water really enjoyable and you’ll know it’s also being cleaned as well. There are plenty of naysayers about these filters, but they are pretty affordable and work incredibly well. Gamechanger for coffee too.
RO = reverse osmosis? I’m planning to figure out what system I should get soon. Look for a whole house option. Would be interested in any info or review you have. Thanks
I’ve had two 3m systems and have had no problems. I installed sensors in both for monitoring particles in input and output lines. You don’t need to do this, but I think it’s reassuring to see that your tap input is relatively stable and nothing has gone haywire with system contamination or a bad filter etc. My 3m systems were both quite small and maintance has been simple (once a year). I imagine the different systems are all relatively similar. My first home came with the 3m system and I liked it so installed I next home. Afraid I’m not a good comparative source.
I use RO too but low key bit concerned about amide nanoplastics released by the RO membrane
Not a water person, but it might be the fire departments fault. If they use a hydrant upstream of you it flows so much water so fast that it can stir up some older stuff that’s been sitting in there a while.
Ah interesting, could def see that happening.
Where I am most people are happy to drink the tap water, and we’re all oddly proud of it. Which is fair, it’s great water. Very soft too, I remember seeing ads on TV for products to remove limescale but that doesn’t really happen here much. I find it a little odd that some places’ tap water is so full of impurities that it leaves mineral deposits on their appliances.
Come to Scotland, try our tap water!
Scotland and North-West England have excellent tap water. The water in the Midlands and London is perfectly safe to drink, but it certainly has a taste to it.
If you wish to taste some Finnish ones, I’m sure I can bottle and ship some of our tapwater for you guys to taste.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/GceNsojnMf0
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I just wonder about PEX tubing. Occasionally, the water has a strong plasticky taste/smell like hose water and I feel like that just can’t be good for you.
Gotta get those excess micro plastics somehow
[people drinking out of lead pipes] 🗿
I live in San Francisco, give me hetch hetchy
(that’s where our tap comes from)
I used to live in Los Angeles and lived in Charlie Chaplin’s house that was on the old lot(the current Broadway shoes).
The water coming into the house was probably clean, but the home’s pipes were all lead. I did one of those lead tests and it failed.
So your sulfur taste could be from the home and not from the municipal water.
