We are told to keep drinking water. Especially tap water. For myself the tap water in London tastes and smells horrible. So I used to spend (waste) money on buying bottled water. My mother would say that I had more money than sense. However, I was told to try boil tap water. Let it cool then pour it into clean or possibly sterile glass bottles ( I got some from Lakeland but I think you can get them from other places. These go in the dishwasher). Then put them in the fridge. When I take them out and drink the water tastes good. If there is any sediment at the bottom ( in London we have very hard lime water) I just throw it away. It sounds complicated but it's not. In many ways it's far easier than mixing up a baby's bottle. Also it costs nothing and the experts tell us it's far better than bottled water and better
for the environment.
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jangreen
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I rely on rain water for drinking, but I only drink it after first putting it through a water filter using activated carbon and then boiling and cooling it. I've seen what goes into the house gutters and what sometimes comes out of the rainwater tap!
Municipal tap water may not be all that palatable, but it should be safe to drink if given it comes from a treated water supply. The objectionable smell can be the result of the chlorine treatment to kill off any bugs. You are either smelling very low concentrations of the chlorine gas itself or compounds the chlorine forms when it reacts with organic material in the water. Your process is certainly a good way to stay safe if you are neutropenic. You could even just put on more water to boil than you want for your hot cuppa, and let the rest cool for later use as drinking!
Best water is certainly not in central UK! Oxford's is so hard it hardly comes out of the tap.....but a filter does make it both drinkable and stops kettle furring up (adding a tea bag also helps....obviously after pouring out of kettle!).
Give me Scottish, Welsh or, possibly the best, Cornish any time.....dare I say it, even better than beer!
Coca Cola did try selling London municipal tapwater a few years back - discovered when a water main to the plant ruptured and caused a local flood. Funnily enough brand, sales nose-dived, and the 'product' was withdrawn, Disani if I remember correctly.
Definitely a case of be careful what you pay for.
i have a water filter that is connected to my cold water system and uses the same tap. One simple dial and I am able to have filtered or unfiltered water without the expense of boiling etc. Once fitted a filter last twelve months and cost approx £20 to replace.
I think the chlorine taste also depends how far away you are from the treatment plant. We are quite close to ours and notice that the chlorine tends to increase after heavy rain - we suspect that they add more to counteract the effect of run-off from the pasture fields. I use an ordinary jug filter, but sometimes it still doesn't taste right, so add a slice of lemon. When we go away, I take refillable bottles with a filter which seem to work ok. I don't want to use single-use plastic bottles, or buy water (which I suspect is often only tap water anyway) more than I can help.
I never had a problem with London tap water in the 40 years I lived there, but I did find that a wee drop of vanilla essence made it very palatable at no great cost.
There's a number of factors that influence the taste of tap water, including the source water and the dissolved salts, the kind of water treatment and filtering it has undergone, the type of sterilisation process involved (Chlorine is common but there are other processes), the pipes used to distribute the water and their age and so on. As Maggie observed, when there's been heavy rain, there's more organic material in the water from run-off picking up everything that's been collecting in the countryside since the last rain. So there's more need for sterilisation. And as Maggie observed, there needs to be sufficient sterilisation added at the treatment plant to ensure that those furtherest from the plant still get safe water.
There are different kinds of water filters too; there are particle filters that remove particles (soil, organic matter, deposits from inside the pipes as well as activated carbon filters that can absorb some of the unpleasant smelling/tasting molecules.
Hard water, which causes the furring in kettles is caused by high levels of calcium and magnesium in the water - typically from limestone based soils. Particle and activated carbon filters can't remove these salts and if your water is hard, you'll find you need more soap to create a lather. You can get exchange filters, which contain zeolite crystals that are charged up with sodium ions from common table salt. Passing water through the zeolite filter results in the calcium and magnesium ions being swapped out for sodium ions. This 'softens' the water, improving its taste and reducing the scaling in your kettle (and your hot water system), plus you'll save on soap, but you'll need to buy kilograms of salt every so often to recharge the exchange filter.
We have some of the 'hardest' water in the world where I live and I worked for a while on a project that reported water quality alerts.
Neil
I live in the country and get my water from a well which is biologically ok but has a fairly high degree of calcium. Water to the house goes through a 30 micron sediment filter and then under the kitchen sink I have a GE SmartWater cartridge filter to supply a dedicated fawcet for drinking water plus the dishwasher (to mineral clouding on glassware).
You can get the cartridges with various degrees of filtration. The higher the filtration level the less the amount of water which can be put through them before needing replacement. I use a multi-media high filtration unit good for about 600 gallons.
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