It's a big business that I used to think was a crock but after having various samples of water tested, I'm sold. Penta is best.
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.
I get water out of the tap and use the same glass over and over. I don't care what bottled water tastes like, I'm not paying for it!
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.
There could be a problem with stream water. Animals relieve themselves in that stream, upstream from where you are. Pollutants from the air are in that water also. Even bacteria and other types of microscopic parasites are living in that water. I do hope that you put disinfectant in that water before you drink it?
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.
There's a major shortage of clean, fresh drinking water in many, many areas of the world. Yep, I think man is about to see where we'll be without it.
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.
Do you have that? Do you like it? How do you clean it? Bleach?
Back in the 1960s my friends used to just add bleach to their camping water.
With my travelling all over the country and not staying in any of my places more than a few days, would the filters get moldy from lack of use? Am I better off just buying the bottled water wherever I go?
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!"
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.
I've always wondered who buys that stuff. Are they that ignorant or do they live in buildings with rotten pipes?
You breathe some of the worst air in world in California.
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.
How did they test for taste?
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.
