Bottled Water vs. Tap Water

Discussion in 'Earth Science' started by sandy, Jul 10, 2007.

  1. milkweed Valued Senior Member

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    Tested for what? I am curious because I did alot of water testing when I took up aquariums and had to find alternative waters because my own tap water (well) was simply too high in minerals.

    I found some problems with different gallon sized bottled waters, but even with those it was mostly due to minerals. I did have one that tested with a very minimal amount of copper (the lowest detectable level on my test) which I wont use because of the shrimp in my tank, and another that had higher than acceptable nitrogen (but within an acceptable drinking level).
     
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  3. milkweed Valued Senior Member

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    Thats what I ended up with for my fishtank. 3-4 gallons of R/O and 1 gallon of my tap provides a balanced aquarium water (I have breeding fish).

    The drawback of the home R/O systems is the basic of the water going in. I looked into what I would need to do because of the hard water and to get the filters in the R/O unit to last, I would need a primary water softener/filtration system for the water before it goes into the R/O unit, or I would be replacing membranes WAY too often for my budget, even with back flushing.

    Most grocery stores around here have an R/O unit and you just bring in your own jugs for refill ($.39 per gallon). I have been using the R/O water for my coffee and cooking for years. Walmart has some 7 gallon jugs so two of those for the fish tank water change. But you have to make sure its a R/O unit because some stores (like in s.dakota) just offer tap water thru a machine. An R/O unit will advertise its an R/O unit. The others just say water.
     
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  5. sandy Banned Banned

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    They tested for everything. I wanted the best.
     
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  7. Nickelodeon Banned Banned

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    everything?
     
  8. phlogistician Banned Banned

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    Apart from BS.
     
  9. milkweed Valued Senior Member

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    OK fine. But usually they give you some kind of documentation about their results which would allow interpretation of hazard risk. Its not normal for water from any source to be free from something detectable.

    So, what was the PH level of any of these samples? That is a basic test that a 5th grader can do with a few drops of testing solution.

    What was the GH/KH of the samples? This is the basic mineral test. It doesnt tell you what kind of minerals, thats a host of different tests.

    A test for everything would give you the ppm (which for water testing is mg/L) for a host of minerals. So can you give me one example of one mineral result from all these tests you had done? I am curious about the most alarming facts you uncovered in these tests you did. There are plenty of minerals which are very good to have in your water (at some levels) and a primary source for your bodies health.

    Responding with "they tested for everything" does not help people make informed decisions. Maybe there are some people here reading these posts who should reconsider whether they use R/O drinking water for cooking. And then maybe theres people here becoming concerned needlessly due to the taste of iron in your water being undesirable, yet harmless in the health scope of this issue.
     
  10. milkweed Valued Senior Member

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    Theres tests for that too. Many many tests.

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

     
  11. phlogistician Banned Banned

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    I have a simple one. I look for right wing xtian rhetoric by someone posing as a female, and label it 'BS'
     
  12. sandy Banned Banned

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    LOL. They tested for purity. Some of the water was too hard. Some had trace minerals I did not want to drink. Some had too high chlorine. You know what I mean.
     
  13. milkweed Valued Senior Member

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    A better answer than "they tested for everything".

    Chlorine/chlordine is a nasty tasting no doubt.

    Water analysis from a water treatment plant on the potomac (just for an example):
    http://www.wsscwater.com/info/TapAnalysis05.pdf

    Back to the R/O unit topic, one needs to research what the various filtration systems remove. Some are very good, some are a waste of money. The better ones require more filter changes to keep things from getting through and the better the filter, the more expensive the cartridges. Also alot of these waste alot of water. You can find very high ratio of wasted water to get one gallon of filtered water, depending on the unit and the quality of the water your putting through it.
     
  14. sandy Banned Banned

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    That's why I'm thinking just buy bottled water wherever I am. Puttin RO on all those properties (many of which sit empty) would probably be a huge waste of money.
     
  15. Myles Registered Senior Member

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    I worry more about how they may contaminate the ground water. Sandy may be aiding and abetting the pollution of the water she refuses to drink.
     
  16. Myles Registered Senior Member

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    Please tell us what the tests entailed.
     
  17. Myles Registered Senior Member

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    I did the same thing in the Dublin mountains when I was a boy but the stream was close to the source and unlikely to have been polluted.
     
  18. cosmictraveler Be kind to yourself always. Valued Senior Member

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    You breathe some of the worst air in world in California. Air itself is very

    polluted today so even if you drank the purest of water you're still going to

    be breathing the foulest of air! You breathe allot more than you drink.
     
  19. Myles Registered Senior Member

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    As will the rest of us.
     
  20. Myles Registered Senior Member

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    How did they test for taste ?
     
  21. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    It's still basically a crock. The quality of most municipal water systems in America has not degraded in the 25 years since Consumers Union's blindfolded panel of "experts" named New York City tap water as the best tasting and their scientists found it to be perfectly healthy. Regions like metropolitan Washington where the population has exploded and antiquated systems are straining under the load are of course exceptions.

    Yes we all have different taste preferences and there are subtle differences but visual factors, expectations, suggestions from friends and media hype all conspire to make us taste differences that aren't there. I suggest that you work with some friends and set up your own blindfold taste test before you spend any more money on this.
    Good for you! Nestle, a world-famous candymaker, now earns more than half of its corporate income by selling water. I'm always astounded when I see people who live on really modest incomes buying bottles of water from vending machines in the company lunch room, where it costs more than twice as much as gasoline. Still, if you've performed a blindfold taste test and really don't like the taste of your municipal water, the in-home filtration systems are far more sensibly priced. Even the vending machine outside your supermarket (if it's a true reverse-osmosis system) will bring the price down to less than half a buck per gallon and is well worth the effort of hauling the jugs around.
    The reason they tell you not to drink still water is that the aeration of flowing water acts as a natural disinfectant. Nothing is 100% chemically pure, you just need the water to be clean enough for your immune system to handle the impurities.

    The Nanny State that has hijacked America has gotten us pampering our immune systems and I'm concerned about it. City kids in particular are growing up with immune systems that have never had to respond to some of life's most common molecules, and have fashionable new sensitivities that were almost unheard of during my childhood. I mean come on folks, how would a human being who was allergic to frelling wheat have survived throughout most of the history of western civilization? Who ever heard of allergies to dogs or perfume fifty years ago except as a medical curiosity?

    My wife is a textbook illustration of this phenomenon. We spent a month in Mexico in 1978. I was sensible about the tap water and didn't drink it, but otherwise I didn't regard it as poison. She brushed her teeth with the bottled water in the room and (as I put it) taped her mouth shut in the shower. As a result she came down with dysentery twice during the trip and I was just fine.
    Now that they can see further into the earth, they've discovered that there are truly colossal aquifers buried deep beneath the surface. One single gigantic pocket of water about two miles down contains literally enough water to satisfy the entire planet's needs for a whole century. Of course the irony is that this one is under Iraq, but there are others.

    But you're right, the politics of this century will be about water, not petroleum. The root of the conflict in Darfur, for example, is a water shortage.
    Back in the 1960s my friends used to just add bleach to their camping water.
    A friend of mine kept her Brita pitcher in the refrigerator and didn't use it very often. One day she pulled it out and it was full of mold. I told her, "What did you expect? You filtered all the chlorine out of it!"
    I've always wondered who buys that stuff. Are they that ignorant or do they live in buildings with rotten pipes?
    You're way behind the information curve. The air in L.A. has been steadily improving for decades. When I moved to Pasadena in 1960, on a bad day you couldn't see the top of a 13-story building. Now on most days you can see the mountains. Our vehicle emissions standards have been stricter than most other states. Of course now that we want to make them even tighter, the Bush Dynasty won't let us because it might reduce the profits of the Saudi despots and their other buddies in the petroleum industry. L.A. County was implementing a mandatory telecommuting policy in the 1990s, and when King George II took over he put pressure on state and local governments to stop discouraging the use of gasoline.

    A friend of mine just returned from a month in China. She said the air is so bad there that her son was constantly fighting his respiratory problems, and there were many days when he couldn't leave the hotel. It's unimaginable how they think they can actually host the Olympics. The athletes will be collapsing. Has an athlete ever died during the Olympics, except at the hands of terrorists? This could be the first time.

    You have no idea what you're talking about when you throw around terms like "some of the worst air in the world," so I'd appreciate it if you'd stop denigrating California with forty-year-old data.
    Consumers Union simply blindfolded the judges and included a glass of tap water in the samples. It was a revelation that people have forgotten in their eternal quest to conform to fad, fashion, and advertising hype.
     
  22. cosmictraveler Be kind to yourself always. Valued Senior Member

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    10:13 AM PDT on Monday, April 30, 2007

    The Associated Press

    Los Angeles once again topped the American Lung Association's bad air list of most polluted cities in America.

    The association found that the Los Angeles metropolitan area, which includes Riverside County, had the worst air based on 2003 through 2005 figures. Overall, 26 counties in California failed the clean air test and only one city made it onto the group's clean air list -- Salinas.

    "Nobody is surprised that LA has an air pollution problem," said Janice Nolen, the association's assistant vice president for national policy and advocacy. "The problems there are one of the reasons we have the Clean Air Act. But it is important for folks to know that there has been some improvement."

    The Pittsburgh area was ranked as the nation's second most polluted metropolitan area followed in order by Bakersfield, Calif., Birmingham, Ala., Detroit and Cleveland.

    The news wasn't all bad for Los Angeles. Despite the dubious distinction, the number of days residents breathed the nation's worst ozone levels was fewer than in previous years.

    The organization based the rankings on ozone pollution levels produced when heat and sunlight come into contact with pollutants from power plants, cars, refineries and other sources. The group also studied particle pollution levels emitted from these sources, which are made up of a mix of tiny solid and liquid particles in the air.

    Such pollution can contribute to heart disease, lung cancer and asthma attacks, the association said. Those especially vulnerable to polluted air are children, senior citizens, people who work or exercise outdoors and people with asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

    Nearly half of the U.S. population lives in counties that still have unhealthy levels of ozone or particle pollution even though there appeared to be less ozone in many counties than previous years, the study found.



    http://www.pe.com/localnews/inland/stories/PE_News_Local_D_websmog.10c3ea9.html
     
  23. cosmictraveler Be kind to yourself always. Valued Senior Member

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    1.What MOLECULES are you refering to?



    2.Just because those that were allergic to wheat weren't talked about or

    reported doesn't mean they weren't around. And yet there still are people

    today that are allergic to wheat and they continue to live, why do you think

    they can survive? Perhaps they just stop eating wheat and eat something

    else.


    3.Doctors didn't have report those allergies to anyone 50 years ago so there

    weren't any records of that problem. Today doctors have to keep reports

    about illnesses and send them to governmental agencies that track these

    disorders. Just because doctors didn't keep records of their patients

    allergies didn't mean they didn't have any.
     

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