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 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”.
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”
cough cough Flint cough
I manage utility services - among other things - for a group of properties - and have had the mains water analysed for chemical and biological contamination at various times. The results have always been absolutely fine. Not just with EU limits, but far, far, far within them for almost everything and definitely well within them for all measures.
I’ve got no issues at all with drinking tap water in the UK, even given the state of the rivers etc.
had the mains water analysed for chemical and biological contamination
Can I ask how you go about doing that? I may want to test some water soon.
I am sure G! will find local water testing for you.
But, before you do that, check your municipal water web site. Mine publishes their testing results. Monthly, iirc.
Of course, this is only part of the puzzle. Your exact tap may have very different results.
In my case, I approached our usual plumbing contractor who have a couple of labs that they usually used. I now go directly to those labs.
Could you tell me which labs? Are they local to you?
We have used ALS Testing in the past. More recently Latis Scientific. Both have been good, we swapped just because of some internal admin thing at one point.
Nice one, thanks
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.
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 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.
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!
Those aren’t necessarily impurities in the nasty sense, just mineral content.
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.
Severn Trent (the midlands) is often voted the best tap water in the UK.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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 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
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 work in a municipal city water department. Part of its job was to deal with some chemical blooms from bad waste disposal. While I am not a water science person, I trusted the water science people who told me it was safe and got to tour some of the cool filtration things.
I didn’t drink the water because water in that area has a “green” taste that’s hard to describe unless you’ve had it. Totally fine to drink, just personal preference. Most people I know gave me a lot of shit for it.
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.
