We have water delivered in 5 gallon jugs for drinking because our tap water is "flavorful". The tap water is perfectly safe to drink, and we use it for coffee and cooking (the heat seems to kill the "flavor").
The cooler we'd salvaged from work when the office changed the decor was leaking at the taps and the hot side had corroded closed. Leaking 5 gallons in about two hours.
So I had our water delivery add a new cooler to our order and it arrived yesterday.
Woo hoo! Says I as I run a cup of hot water for tea.
Alas, there's a river of water coming out from under it. The reservoir was holed! A quick call to our provider had a replacement here today, under warranty no less!
Everything was fast and pleasant. Capitalism at its finest.
I work here in Texas for a company that designs water treatment plants, and let me tell you, if the public ever found the truth about public water, heads would roll. In Texas, the FDA gives us much more relaxed standards to comply with. We are allowed almost 100x the national average of dissolved solids, more than 10x the nat. ave. on suspended solids (mainly algae), and almost that much on many of the metal salts (the really really poisonous stuff, usually measured in parts per billion). Almost all the other states' tap water is indistinguishable from bottled, here in Texas bottled in a necessity. Most Texas tap comes from surface water, ie. lakes and rivers. Although a few pull from deep wells, (artisian) most of the rest pull water from shallow table wells, less than 500 ft deep. Most of these have large or multiple recharge zones (areas where water enters the water table) and can have contaminant spikes. If the testing company tests the well once a year, they will almost certainly not see any bad stuff in the water, My water system taps the upper Trinity formation, and I have seen 2 week runs of contaminants many times, especially in the spring when farmers are fertilizing and weed treating. The wells here (6 main wells) are tested once a year. Most of the folks at my company drink only bottled, and will not allow their families to eat or drink tap water. The consumer filter systems? Divide the life time of each by 6 or more, and you won't be too far off base, although most of these won't remove the really bad stuff, unless they are multistage with a charcoal stage included. Drink bottled and stay healthy!
ReplyDeleteI've got US Filter and Azurix NA on my resume. Those jobs taught me the word "variance".
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