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.
I was in the industry for a decent amount of years. I know the operators of the water plants around me. I never hesitate to drink the tap water in my area. At home it goes through the filter in my fridge, which manages the runoff taste in the spring, and keeps the water cold.
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 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.
I trust the city government with my water much much more than companies trying to save every penny bottling water.
And I’m more likely able to get the people responsible for poor quality water or death in result of this in jail over the likelihood of sending billionaire CEOs with their golden parachutes to a minimum security vacation “prison”.
cough cough Flint cough
whoopsie daisy, we shipped 500 million bottles of tainted water, “we’re sorry”. Meanwhile if a city did that it’d be national news for years.
While I’m a huge fan of municipal water (I live in the city that invented it), lots of cities have horribly mismanaged their water supply, often from privatization, but not exclusively. See Jackson Mississippi.
https://www.npr.org/2022/08/31/1120166328/jackson-mississippi-water-crisis
Oh not saying it doesn’t happen at all, but it’s blown out of proportion for the most of the US. Main point is exactly that, when a city fucks up it becomes national news, if Pepsi fucked up it’s bottling (which comes from city sources anyway), they say “Oh no, we’re sorry”
North East, US here. probably fine but I don’t trust it. we use a water filter for drinking
Same. I can take tap water fine but my wife hates it. But even so, we both can tell by taste when the filter is toast. We can also tell from the way our bathroom counters get white buildup just by incidental water droplets during handwashing that we have excessively hard water. Not dangerous but not pleasant.
I work in food manufacturing and get the local water test results emailed to me monthly - they are alway well within limits
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.
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.
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.
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.
Severn Trent (the midlands) is often voted the best tap water in the UK.
Those aren’t necessarily impurities in the nasty sense, just mineral content.
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I live in San Francisco, give me hetch hetchy
(that’s where our tap comes from)
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] 🗿
Just generally, you can get a report of your municipal water testing. The biggest safety variable that I would be worried about testing at home for is lead in the pipes between me and the treatment plant. That includes my house/building and the municipal pipes.
Now taste, that’s a to each their own situation. Sulfury water is my limit for sure. No thanks!
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.
