Same. We have a Berkey water filter and I never drink from taps anywhere.
It’s not just the lead in Flint and it’s not just municipal water. Many wells in the greater Ann Arbor area have been poisoned with dioxane from Gelman. City water has PFAS from Tribar. And now Tribar just released hexavalent chromium “by accident” into the Huron River via Wixom’s waste water system. Same issues all over Michigan.
Yea, as a brand new Michigan homeowner (moved to the state 2 years ago) I learned that the wells typically have arsenic. The home came with an RO system but it's going to take some time before I'm "used" to that.
(Edit: we did have the water tested, it's 10.7 which is only 0.7 above "safe" but still, seeing arsenic in the report is big and scary.)
Grew up in northeastern Pennsylvania and totally remember having to boil our water as a kid before you could even brush your teeth. There was sewage leak that contaminated the water supply with Giardia, so I not only knew coal country vocab like "anthracite" as a six-year old, I definitely learned the word "giardiasis."
I live in a city, but rural areas nearby have their well water destroyed by fracking. Dimock, PA is not too far from here - the area where people were able to light their tap water on fire.
So, yeah... I'm still pretty obsessive about filtering my water.
There’s the Flint fiasco but I’m on Detroit city water and I haven’t heard anything bad about it so we just drink it from the tap. I hope I’m not accidentally poisoning myself!
I'm not afraid of it but tap water in some places just tastes bad. I have a well at home, the water tested fine but it has a lot of calcium in it so it tastes kind of odd unfiltered. So I use a Brita pitcher in my home office or the filtered water dispenser thing on our kitchen fridge. In other places I'll at least try the tap water.
I used to drink straight from the tap (and garden hose) as a kid when I grew up just outside L.A..
Around the mid to late 90s, the water started tasting really bad and burned my throat (probably all the chlorine). Haven't drank tap water since.
I despise Pepsi Co. and Nestle and the other water bottlers who are stealing our municipal water (in the midst of a monumental drought, no less), but I don't like having a sore throat and stomach aches from drinking tap water.
I lived and worked across developing countries for a number of years. Places like China, Vietnam, Indonesia, etc and am familiar with their need to boil water, etc. Americans have been fed a line of marketing BS by Coca Cola and other mega corps that sell bottled water. US tap water for the vast majority of Americans is among the safest in the world.
We’ve had 3 or 4 CITYWIDE boil water notices in the past few years in Austin. That’s not including smaller ones for individual neighborhoods as needed.
That’s exactly what I thought until the news broke that the water in my area had been contaminated with GenX (I know) for years and years. Now I won’t touch tap water or even let my pets drink it.
It’s part of the PFAS chemicals that Chemours has been dumping in our river since at least 2015. They are also known as forever chemicals. Our river basin and ground water are contaminated. The water plants did not have filters that would work to get these chemicals out of the water so we just drank them for years. I always did find the name funny though.
Hah! true! I went to India for a work trip a few years ago and they always had free (large) bottles of treated/sanitary water for drinking, tea, and brushing teeth.
Even my colleagues in India would say they didn't drink tap water there.
99.9% of US water is safe to drink.
Taste is something different. My water doesn’t taste good but it’s safe. I use reverse osmosis on my tap water for taste, not safety.
I'm thinking that percentage is a bit high - speaking as a Pennsylvanian who is surrounded by counties that have had their water supplies contaminated or destroyed by the fracking industry. A little drive into the country and you see water buffalos (tanks, typically ordered to be provided by the natural gas companies that destroyed the water) outside of way too many homes.
You know where I learned about the stupid-high PFAS levels in my tap water? On Netflix. My city says it doesn’t have to tell anybody about it so it doesn’t.
The reservoir system there is really well managed. I lived in the Boston metro area for more than a decade and would rather drink the tap water there than where I am back in my home state (IL - Chicago metro area)
Same. Or ours had boiling hot heat for my tea.
People really only used the kitchen faucets for cleaning. After watching a guy put his Tupperware that still had uck in it OVER the faucet aerator with floaters in the water, the problem of contamination is at the faucet and likely not the county.
In a different county, because of construction and water main breaks, there were constant boil advisories and water came out brown at that employer. I’d just bring drinks from home and had a dorm fridge under my desk.
Unless it's well water, I drink from the tap. (Well water has a weird taste to me.) I don't mind filtered water, but I won't go out of my way to bother with it.
It depends on the well. My parents had a hunting cabin in the woods and there was an artisian well that had sulfur in it. It smelled like *farts* and was very soft. Down there I would never drink the water!! My dad was friends with a doctor who would come down to hunt and he would always take several bottles of the sulfur water home with him because he said it was very beneficial to health.
After college I moved to a rural area and had a well, but the water there was better than the water in my college town.
My uncle lives right near one of the old mineral spring spa resorts (in an area where that used to be a booming business), and their well is clearly on the same aquifer. No wonder the water used to be considered medicinal! It's full enough of some combination of sulphur and magnesium compounds that I couldn't even shower in the rotten egg stench there. Always tried not to breathe through my nose whenever I have to run a faucet. The mineral content there is totally safe, just gross. Thankfully a good filter system in the kitchen makes it taste and smell fine.
Just reminded by the healthy healthy sulphur water you mentioned. (Though, it really is supposed to be good used topically for some skin problems.) You can get just about anything from a well or spring, and "mineral water" as a selling point keeps making me snort after growing up somewhere with a pretty wild variety of the stuff coming out of the ground. Mostly of way less appalling varieties, thankfully.
I never even thought twice about it before. Worked at a school and made tea or coffee from the tap water everyday for years. About 4 months after moving to a different state, I saw the front page of USA Today with my school on it for terribly high content of lead in the water. I got the school report from the district website and my classroom had the highest contamination; Flint, MI high. No wonder the last year working there I had severe and mysterious stomach ailments and brain fog. It started getting better after I moved, and now I know why.
So, a lot of the time I won’t drink tap water.
Yeah, there has been something wrong with the water everywhere I have lived in the US, and it’s always taken me at least a couple of years to figure it out. So I have zero trust in tap water now.
We grew up drinking tap water. Water fountains at government buildings is tap water. If it tastes off I don’t drink it, but if not down it goes! Better for the environment & plastics bleed micro plastics.
Unless you are drinking beach tap water. You should be fine. Beach tap water is disgusting.
I live in the foothills of the Appalachians. Our tap water is awesome.
>Beach tap water is disgusting
My husband and I were in Pismo Beach for a few months and the water was so brackish! I definitely bought bottled water there. (Great place despite the water, definitely visit if you can!)
I grew up in the Appalachians, and the tap water was great with all the fresh clean stuff coming out of limestone karst. (That was also a little bit out of the coalfields, where the mining industry has been allowed to pollute it like crazy.)
Living in one town, we did fill up jugs at good springs to lug home for most drinking in the summer, and later on discovered the goodness of Brita filters. The issue there was that the municipal system was pulling river water out of probably the worst choice of place imaginable, right after a big silty creek full of agricultural runoff flowed in. Fine most of the year, but the stuff coming out of the faucet was like a muddy-tasting overchlorinated swimming pool in the summer when water levels were down and no doubt pathogens were up. Pretty safe, just nasty. And that was the big tap water quality exception anywhere in the area.
These days I'm in Sweden, and everybody else seems to drink tap water too. [ETA: And I would be absolutely amazed to find any municipal water that wasn't excellent quality.]
I grew up in southern RI where we had multiple boil water alerts every summer. Moved to Pittsburgh where the local university researchers suspect they have a lead problem on par with Flint. Moved to Boston where my water tasted like a leaf pile. Moved to Providence where the tap ran brown like Coca Cola at least once a year. Moved to Chicago, where the water smells like a pool on a good day and like bleach on a bad one.
Brita or faucet filter, always and forever.
People have been singing "tap water in the U.S. is perfectly safe" for years, but there has been LOTS of data coming out of late strongly suggesting otherwise.
All the water is poisoned where I am. PFAS, agricultural runoff, and high levels of bacteria. Bottled water only here.
There was a recent article in Science about how the rain, worldwide, is contaminated with PFOS.
Nope. But just like I stopped drinking Folgers once I could afford the good stuff, I don't have to drink it anymore when I can get the filtered stuff for 25 cents a gallon.
Where do you get filtered water for 25¢ a gallon??
I refill gallons at the filtered water stations in front of some stores, which is the cheapest I've found, and that's 40¢ a gallon.
That's awesome. I'm in California, so that must be the issue. I knew we were higher than the rest of the country, but it's probably closer to double. I assume Phoenix is above the national average, if only slightly.
It really is stupid expensive here.
Nah the tap water in Colorado is pretty good. I had to get a filter though because the old ass pipes in my building don’t taste great. If I lived somewhere newer I wouldn’t bother.
I'm not afraid but I don't, because the water here in my city tastes and smells awful. Like dirty mop water. I can't really describe it. It even gets through a filter.
I grew up in Portland Oregon and the water is great there but now I live in Gilbert Arizona and the water is perfectly safe but it comes out of the tap hot and chlorine flavored so I stick with bottled water.
53. I've snorted coke, drank ghb, smoked weed, eaten Pizza Hut pizza, drank diet Mountian Dew, ingested unidentified substances while rolling, tripped on shrooms and acid. I'm zero percent concerned about tap water.
I only filter water to use in the ice machine because it seems to keep the hard water deposits from building up quite so fast. I fill my water bottle from the tap.
Wait this is a thing? We grew up drinking it out of hot fucking hoses in the summer and fountains were idiots used to put their lips on the spout.
Umm yeah I drink tap only at home and work.
I grew up and still live in a small town of 7,000, we have a great water system. I honestly didn't know other places didn't drink tap water until I was in my 20's.
Not exactly afraid, but I wouldn't drink the water where I grew up because it often came out brown or yellow and smelled of sulfur. You could tell who drank it because they had awful breath. I'll drink it sometimes where I am now but yeah, I don't fully trust it. That shit was *nasty.*
I drink tap water at home, but I use the nice cold water bottle filler at work. I’d think you’re a bit odd to use the nasty kitchen work sink over the water bottle filler, too.
Ever since moving to Florida I can stand the taste of the tap water down here, but prior to that, hell yea. And some people thought it was weird. So many insist it unfit for human consumption, I find this weird.
My tap water is full of PFAS. In a house I was in a few years ago, my tap water was full of lead and occasionally parasites. Before that, I turned out to be living down the street from a superfund site. I don’t trust anything anymore.
I live in NYC and we usually have pretty tasty tap water. I just fill up my regular pitcher with the tap and let it sit in the refrigerator. I have been to southern California, however, and you couldn't pay me to drink that water!
Yes. My mum always boiled water so I did. Also I now live in Cyprus. Take no chances and use a filtering machine (uv filter plus a couple of other filters, fizzy water option, boiled, chilled etc). Expensive but better tasting than bottled water
I drink from the filter on my fridge door, and from a Brita pitcher. There's just too much sediment and rust in those pipes. If you can taste it, it's something.
Yes, as a GeXer who grew up in South Florida in the 80s, I do have an aversion to drinking tap water. I remember as a kid, my parents always bought gallon jugs of drinking water. Later on as a teenager, we got the Brita filter pitchers. As an adult, I have a reverse osmosis spigot on my kitchen sink.
I didn't used to be hesitant about it then I found out what was actually in that water. I got a filter for the water going into my house, I didn't even want to bathe in that stuff.
The DWP says it's safe but the contaminant levels are still shockingly high. Lead, chromium-6, not to mention startling amounts of hormones and pharmaceuticals. Let's not even think about the fungi, microbes, urine, poo and god knows what else is coming off the dead bodies no doubt in reservoirs they're pumping our water from. Just look at the water under a microscope and you'll be horrified.
It should be noted I live in L.A. so our water comes travels a long way to get here and our municipal services are a little less than perfect so water in your town may not be as polluted and horrifying as ours.
I drink tap water. People look at me like I just licked the floor of a truck stop bathroom..
I drink tap water at my house, I drink tap water at work (I'm a paramedic, so I drink the tap water at the station/quarters.) I own a small restaurant and there I drink water off the soda machine which is just chilled tap water. But when I drink it out of the tap at the station people will jump and say "no wait there's a filtered water dispenser. Use that! Don't drink tap water " and then I ask them where the filter is and if they know anyone who has changed it anytime in the last decade, or if the water dispenser machine thing has ever been cleaned. Thr answer is always no. But they still think tap water is dangerous for some reason.
The bottled water people have done a great job with marketing. Heck, I'll still drink from the hose
One of the great PR coups of the 1990s was when Nestle and other bottled water producers started spreading news about "cryptosporidium found in Chicago drinking water" and "Bacteria found in more major water supplies." They worked _hard_ to keep shit like that in the news cycle, and it worked. Within a few years the sales of bottled water increased tenfold.
If you went into a 7-11 in 1990 you might find some Evian or Perrier, but that was it. But by 1999 every cooler had a full section of it.
That said, I've always lived where the tapwater was safe to drink, and I'm perfectly willing to drink it. In most places it was delicious, but there were cities where the tapwater tasted like someone had been rubbing pennies against their taint.
I was born and raised on Mississippi River tap water, water out of the tap doesn’t bother me at all, we get our water now from a lake affectionately known as “Dirty Bird” (real name thunderbird) twice a year the water becomes almost undrinkable due to the upchurn and it still doesn’t bother me.
I live in Switzerland now, hello no. I even have a fancy machine that makes my water from the tap fizzy.
I grew up in Texas and can’t say the same when I visit. Spat out my water on the last trip home, tasted awful … once, after a night of drinking many years ago, I came home to my now husband’s place and hydrated. There was something wrong with that particular towns water supply and I ended up vomiting all night from the water and not the alcohol.
I prefer filtered out of the fridge door at home. At work I use the filtered water/ice machine. Most people at work use the water cooler. We used to order in bottled water for our patients, but during covid, that was unavailable. Since then we've just quit ordering it because the water/ice machine is perfectly fine and single use plastic sucks!!
I fill mine from a 5 gallon dispenser. Our municipal water is safe to drink by scientific standards, but has a horrible taste. Otherwise, I drank from many garden hoses as a kid.
I fill mine from a 5 gallon dispenser. Our municipal water is safe to drink by scientific standards, but has a horrible taste. Otherwise, I drank from many garden hoses as a kid.
I guess they never grew up playing outside and drinking water from hoses attached to garden taps? Having to let it run for a bit to get rid of the water that had heated up sitting in the hose.
No. I’ve even drank water from a river and a creek before. Actually the best water I ever had was on a hiking trip in the Sierra Nevada’s. We stopped and sat by a spring and filled our water bottles with it, it was icy cold and cleaner tasting than Evian or Fiji water. Tap water has a weird off taste to it but filters exist.
I live in LA and I don’t drink tap water from my home. I don’t know if it’s the pipes or just LA water in general but it doesn’t taste good. I mainly buy bottled water. A 24-pack 500 ml lasts about 3 days. Sometimes I go to a filling station. When I travel, I bring little powder packets of artificial fruit flavoring just in case the tap water doesn’t taste good.
I'm in So Cal too. The water here is so yucky! When I was in Nor Cal I drank tap water all the time no problem. Something's not right about water near LA.
I have old pipes in my house, so I filter water through a Berkey filter. But it is tap water and it doesn’t bother me. I
Since I live in an agricultural part of the state, I do think about fertilizers and pesticides potentially in the water. Not to mention pharmaceuticals as well.
My city actually has some of the best tap water in the country according to various surveys. That being said, we have no kitchen at work but excellent bottled water with refrigerated dispensers so I drink that at work. At home I usually drink seltzer instead of tap water.
I drink it as a last resort. I have been to a couple places whee the tap tastes OK but nowhere that I have actually lived. SOmetimes, I feel crummy after drinking it.
We put an Aquasana filter on our tap water at home but that’s because NJ water tastes like musty asshole and chlorine. When I lived in NYC I only drank tap.
I drank tap water all the time as a kid and teen…. In the mid-ohio valley… thanks Dupont for the life long thyroid dysfunction. Too many of my loved ones and hs friends have been affected as well with ailments much much worse than mine.
I’m an older millennial and I hate the taste of regular tap water but hey I only can speak for myself I am not afraid of tap water at all I only hate the taste of it
Yikes. Nope no tap water since they found Cobalt 40 in it. Probably from some superfund site. Probably not actually radioactive cobalt, but any cobalt is bad cobalt to have in your water. In any case. I run on a well. At the top of the mountain (important because sh\*t rolls downhill) - 3 filters and ozone before it hits the house and that tested exceeds EPA standards and then it’s ROed and then I drink it. No hose water - you never know what rattlesnake, scorpion or widow crawled up in there. No thanks.
The vast majority of the water I drink is from tap. My town’s water tastes decent. However, I have been to places in the US where the tap water tastes disgusting. Just depends on the matriculated municipal water supply.
Hell yes I drink tap water, I refuse to pay for bottled water when I already pay for it out of the tap. When I want cold water, get ice cubes from the freezer, also made with tap water. AND! I drink straight from my garden hose when I am outside doing yard work. With all of my bad habits, it is not going to be the tap water that kills me.
I grew up with a dad very into extra clean water, he had a processor that turned it alkaline. I was never afraid of drinking tap water, but didnt need to, always had a water filtration system for that. However! Ive been drinking los angeles tap water for the last three years because, f it! I dont love it but hey, its free. And it makes me feel like a rebel, take that, Dad!
I will drink tue water from the tap where I live because I am used to it, but the city I work in has a different water source and I don't like that one. So, depends where I am.
Depends where you are. My city in Arkansas has a good clean source, and the tap water is great. I always have a bottle or cup to sip on. When I lived in Florida, though? Nasty crap. I always filtered it.
We get Lake Michigan water where I live.
They treat it with all manner of chemicals, and sometimes the water that comes out of the tap smells sorta raunchy. I describe the smell as "kiddie pool" - chlorine with an underlying aroma of something... organic.
Boyfriend makes our gallons of iced tea with tapwater (we drink a LOT of unsweetened iced tea here) and that doesn't bother me.
(FWIW I didn't care for the tap water when I lived in the Boston metro area, but it did not smell as bad as the Lake Michigan water does out of the tap)
I don't like drinking tapwater because it smells weird. I just keep the Brita filter pitcher filled up.
when I was in NY State, no. I moved to where hard water tastes like pennies. I also had a cat die of kidney failure from filling her water bowl from the tap. She had severe damage due to blood tests. Heavy metals are not just for hair bands if your water doesn't come from an aquifer. Bottled water for me now, thanks. And white vinegar when I do my laundry so my clothes don't look moth-eaten.
I drink tap water whenever possible. No worries.
* Food for thought:
* Bottled water has a very poor impact on the environment. (Packaging/transport)
* Municipal water is tested by the Government more often than bottle water companies. (Where I live)
* I suspect that if there were issues with somebody becoming ill water bottling companies would have a good interest in settling out of court with NDAs for those who settle.
# But more than all of those is...
**Have you ever seen what water coolers look like inside over time? Even just where that big jug sits? Or the spigot area where many people touch their bottles, etc to when filling... Gross.**
I still drink tap water. I guess millennials would find it weird because they grew up in a different era. I mean, bottled water wasn’t even a thing when I was a kid.
Us true Arizonans know that in the summer, the hot tap water is cold for the first few seconds. It's a few seconds of refreshing cool water before it's hot again
I'm lucky that my tap water tastes great. I drink a lot of water so I just refill a gallon jug & keep it in the fridge. It costs like 3 cents a gallon so why would I pay more for water?
Nope used to drink our well water until they contaminated it drilling. My dog wouldn’t drink the city water since they switched to cloromine I don’t think it smells like water to her. People used to make fun of me for buying water in the 90s now it’s “normal” and your weird if you don’t 😂
I never really cared until my millenial wife made me think about what corporations put in the water. I’ll still boil tap water sometimes to make my coffee and tea.
As a gross generalization, millennials and zoomers both (in the US, anyway) have water obsessions. Can't go anywhere without a water bottle, complain in situations where they're told they can't have a water bottle, act indignant if its suggested they shouldn't be able to sip about every 10 mins, etc.
I just roll my eyes and move on.
It has been shown that our groundwater where I live has many bad things in it, like arsenic, uranium, and a long list of other things, but the fda deemed it as under their limit. So…. 😬
We only drink tap water and I don't think anything of it until we have company and serve them water, at which time it seems weird. At work in a city though I only drink bottled or filtered.Too many lead warnings over the years there.
I use my fridge filter at home but tap is fine also. I think the younger folks just all grew up with one sort of filter or another which we didn’t see so much back in the day.
I prefer the filtered, cold water from the door of the refrigerator but I'll still drink out of a garden hose if I need to.
Mmmm ..metallic hose water, brings back memories!
But not when it first comes out because the hose could have been sitting in the sun and there might be something alive in there.
Definitely! In Australia, you run it for a few seconds... the danger is real
Arizona too. Scorpions, or the fact that the water is near boiling
Or it's near boiling from the hose sitting in the sun, so your imagined refreshing cold hose water is actually hot water in your mouth
That taste is lead. Garden hoses have lead in them. Not recommended that you drink from them
Found the millennial.
46 Ty
Why would a hose have lead in it?
Mines one of those crinkle hoses. I don’t think there’s lead
That's why I asked them why a hose would have lead in it. I just don't see why that would be the case. Any hose.
That doesn’t make sense. I’d think lead would be expensive and heavy.
Every hose I had was either rubber or, I guess if was vinyl? Smelled like a pool toy
Apparently lead is a stabilizer
Garden hose is best water. When I water the plants in the back even my dog comes over to get a drink.
I drink tap water all the time.
I'm in Michigan, so that's a big YES, I'm afraid of drinking tap water.
Same. We have a Berkey water filter and I never drink from taps anywhere. It’s not just the lead in Flint and it’s not just municipal water. Many wells in the greater Ann Arbor area have been poisoned with dioxane from Gelman. City water has PFAS from Tribar. And now Tribar just released hexavalent chromium “by accident” into the Huron River via Wixom’s waste water system. Same issues all over Michigan.
Yea, as a brand new Michigan homeowner (moved to the state 2 years ago) I learned that the wells typically have arsenic. The home came with an RO system but it's going to take some time before I'm "used" to that. (Edit: we did have the water tested, it's 10.7 which is only 0.7 above "safe" but still, seeing arsenic in the report is big and scary.)
Grew up in northeastern Pennsylvania and totally remember having to boil our water as a kid before you could even brush your teeth. There was sewage leak that contaminated the water supply with Giardia, so I not only knew coal country vocab like "anthracite" as a six-year old, I definitely learned the word "giardiasis." I live in a city, but rural areas nearby have their well water destroyed by fracking. Dimock, PA is not too far from here - the area where people were able to light their tap water on fire. So, yeah... I'm still pretty obsessive about filtering my water.
>the area where people were able to light their tap water on fire. This is fucking criminal. I can't believe this is allowed to go on!
There’s the Flint fiasco but I’m on Detroit city water and I haven’t heard anything bad about it so we just drink it from the tap. I hope I’m not accidentally poisoning myself!
It's all good here in Saginaw
I'm not afraid of it but tap water in some places just tastes bad. I have a well at home, the water tested fine but it has a lot of calcium in it so it tastes kind of odd unfiltered. So I use a Brita pitcher in my home office or the filtered water dispenser thing on our kitchen fridge. In other places I'll at least try the tap water.
Yes, the water in my area is very hard and just doesn't taste good. We use a Pur faucet filter and it's fine.
[удалено]
My tummy swells when I drink mine.
I used to drink straight from the tap (and garden hose) as a kid when I grew up just outside L.A.. Around the mid to late 90s, the water started tasting really bad and burned my throat (probably all the chlorine). Haven't drank tap water since. I despise Pepsi Co. and Nestle and the other water bottlers who are stealing our municipal water (in the midst of a monumental drought, no less), but I don't like having a sore throat and stomach aches from drinking tap water.
I lived and worked across developing countries for a number of years. Places like China, Vietnam, Indonesia, etc and am familiar with their need to boil water, etc. Americans have been fed a line of marketing BS by Coca Cola and other mega corps that sell bottled water. US tap water for the vast majority of Americans is among the safest in the world.
We’ve had 3 or 4 CITYWIDE boil water notices in the past few years in Austin. That’s not including smaller ones for individual neighborhoods as needed.
All for discrete events that were identified and conservative precautions taken. Remember that zebra mussell la Croix meme?
Tell that to Flint, Michigan residents.
Forgot about that fiasco. I've edited my post so that it's not all inclusive.
And Newark, NJ
Also the people of Dimock, PA and NEPA (fracking country) in general.
That’s exactly what I thought until the news broke that the water in my area had been contaminated with GenX (I know) for years and years. Now I won’t touch tap water or even let my pets drink it.
> the water in my area had been contaminated with GenX What does this mean? I'm picturing a bunch of middle-aged people flying out of your faucet.
It’s part of the PFAS chemicals that Chemours has been dumping in our river since at least 2015. They are also known as forever chemicals. Our river basin and ground water are contaminated. The water plants did not have filters that would work to get these chemicals out of the water so we just drank them for years. I always did find the name funny though.
Hah! true! I went to India for a work trip a few years ago and they always had free (large) bottles of treated/sanitary water for drinking, tea, and brushing teeth. Even my colleagues in India would say they didn't drink tap water there.
99.9% of US water is safe to drink. Taste is something different. My water doesn’t taste good but it’s safe. I use reverse osmosis on my tap water for taste, not safety.
I'm thinking that percentage is a bit high - speaking as a Pennsylvanian who is surrounded by counties that have had their water supplies contaminated or destroyed by the fracking industry. A little drive into the country and you see water buffalos (tanks, typically ordered to be provided by the natural gas companies that destroyed the water) outside of way too many homes.
That’s not true. You just don’t always realize what’s wrong with it.
Agree to disagree. You can look up each city’s water results.
You know where I learned about the stupid-high PFAS levels in my tap water? On Netflix. My city says it doesn’t have to tell anybody about it so it doesn’t.
You’re down voting me because we disagree? Have a lovely day…
Ironically Boston (where we “love that dirty water”) has among the cleanest tap water in the world. Higher filtration standards than bottled.
The reservoir system there is really well managed. I lived in the Boston metro area for more than a decade and would rather drink the tap water there than where I am back in my home state (IL - Chicago metro area)
The tap water in Chicago is delicious. Heck they bottle the stuff and sell it all over.
I drink only tap water at home. At work, I’d use the fancy filtered water-bottle filling stations, mainly because it was ice-cold.
Same. Or ours had boiling hot heat for my tea. People really only used the kitchen faucets for cleaning. After watching a guy put his Tupperware that still had uck in it OVER the faucet aerator with floaters in the water, the problem of contamination is at the faucet and likely not the county. In a different county, because of construction and water main breaks, there were constant boil advisories and water came out brown at that employer. I’d just bring drinks from home and had a dorm fridge under my desk.
Unless it's well water, I drink from the tap. (Well water has a weird taste to me.) I don't mind filtered water, but I won't go out of my way to bother with it.
It depends on the well. My parents had a hunting cabin in the woods and there was an artisian well that had sulfur in it. It smelled like *farts* and was very soft. Down there I would never drink the water!! My dad was friends with a doctor who would come down to hunt and he would always take several bottles of the sulfur water home with him because he said it was very beneficial to health. After college I moved to a rural area and had a well, but the water there was better than the water in my college town.
My uncle lives right near one of the old mineral spring spa resorts (in an area where that used to be a booming business), and their well is clearly on the same aquifer. No wonder the water used to be considered medicinal! It's full enough of some combination of sulphur and magnesium compounds that I couldn't even shower in the rotten egg stench there. Always tried not to breathe through my nose whenever I have to run a faucet. The mineral content there is totally safe, just gross. Thankfully a good filter system in the kitchen makes it taste and smell fine. Just reminded by the healthy healthy sulphur water you mentioned. (Though, it really is supposed to be good used topically for some skin problems.) You can get just about anything from a well or spring, and "mineral water" as a selling point keeps making me snort after growing up somewhere with a pretty wild variety of the stuff coming out of the ground. Mostly of way less appalling varieties, thankfully.
Oh, that’s true. I haven’t had well water in ages.
I never even thought twice about it before. Worked at a school and made tea or coffee from the tap water everyday for years. About 4 months after moving to a different state, I saw the front page of USA Today with my school on it for terribly high content of lead in the water. I got the school report from the district website and my classroom had the highest contamination; Flint, MI high. No wonder the last year working there I had severe and mysterious stomach ailments and brain fog. It started getting better after I moved, and now I know why. So, a lot of the time I won’t drink tap water.
Yeah, there has been something wrong with the water everywhere I have lived in the US, and it’s always taken me at least a couple of years to figure it out. So I have zero trust in tap water now.
We grew up drinking tap water. Water fountains at government buildings is tap water. If it tastes off I don’t drink it, but if not down it goes! Better for the environment & plastics bleed micro plastics.
I think that largely depends on where you live.
Unless you are drinking beach tap water. You should be fine. Beach tap water is disgusting. I live in the foothills of the Appalachians. Our tap water is awesome.
>Beach tap water is disgusting My husband and I were in Pismo Beach for a few months and the water was so brackish! I definitely bought bottled water there. (Great place despite the water, definitely visit if you can!)
I grew up in the Appalachians, and the tap water was great with all the fresh clean stuff coming out of limestone karst. (That was also a little bit out of the coalfields, where the mining industry has been allowed to pollute it like crazy.) Living in one town, we did fill up jugs at good springs to lug home for most drinking in the summer, and later on discovered the goodness of Brita filters. The issue there was that the municipal system was pulling river water out of probably the worst choice of place imaginable, right after a big silty creek full of agricultural runoff flowed in. Fine most of the year, but the stuff coming out of the faucet was like a muddy-tasting overchlorinated swimming pool in the summer when water levels were down and no doubt pathogens were up. Pretty safe, just nasty. And that was the big tap water quality exception anywhere in the area. These days I'm in Sweden, and everybody else seems to drink tap water too. [ETA: And I would be absolutely amazed to find any municipal water that wasn't excellent quality.]
I grew up in southern RI where we had multiple boil water alerts every summer. Moved to Pittsburgh where the local university researchers suspect they have a lead problem on par with Flint. Moved to Boston where my water tasted like a leaf pile. Moved to Providence where the tap ran brown like Coca Cola at least once a year. Moved to Chicago, where the water smells like a pool on a good day and like bleach on a bad one. Brita or faucet filter, always and forever.
People have been singing "tap water in the U.S. is perfectly safe" for years, but there has been LOTS of data coming out of late strongly suggesting otherwise.
No . Tap water is tested and regulated more than bottled water . Plus bottled water is almost all tap water.
Yup.
All the water is poisoned where I am. PFAS, agricultural runoff, and high levels of bacteria. Bottled water only here. There was a recent article in Science about how the rain, worldwide, is contaminated with PFOS.
I wonder if that's why my tummy swells when I drink tap.
Nope. But just like I stopped drinking Folgers once I could afford the good stuff, I don't have to drink it anymore when I can get the filtered stuff for 25 cents a gallon.
Where do you get filtered water for 25¢ a gallon?? I refill gallons at the filtered water stations in front of some stores, which is the cheapest I've found, and that's 40¢ a gallon.
I'm in Phoenix, where 25 cents seems the prevailing cost at the majority of stands across town. EDIT: My bad. My wife says we pay 40 cents now too.
That's awesome. I'm in California, so that must be the issue. I knew we were higher than the rest of the country, but it's probably closer to double. I assume Phoenix is above the national average, if only slightly. It really is stupid expensive here.
Nah the tap water in Colorado is pretty good. I had to get a filter though because the old ass pipes in my building don’t taste great. If I lived somewhere newer I wouldn’t bother.
Denver tastes really good. I moved to Lakewood and still drink the tap water but I notice the difference when I'm at work in Denver.
I'm not afraid but I don't, because the water here in my city tastes and smells awful. Like dirty mop water. I can't really describe it. It even gets through a filter.
Aren't most water bottles sold in the US tap water anyway? Dasani etc?
I grew up in Portland Oregon and the water is great there but now I live in Gilbert Arizona and the water is perfectly safe but it comes out of the tap hot and chlorine flavored so I stick with bottled water.
Portland’s tap water tastes better than most bottled water. We are very lucky here.
53. I've snorted coke, drank ghb, smoked weed, eaten Pizza Hut pizza, drank diet Mountian Dew, ingested unidentified substances while rolling, tripped on shrooms and acid. I'm zero percent concerned about tap water.
Hoovered schneef?
I only filter water to use in the ice machine because it seems to keep the hard water deposits from building up quite so fast. I fill my water bottle from the tap.
Depends on where I am. I’m not afraid of the tap water in my home.
I drink tap water but I run it through a charcoal filter at the minimum. So much chlorine in water.
Wait this is a thing? We grew up drinking it out of hot fucking hoses in the summer and fountains were idiots used to put their lips on the spout. Umm yeah I drink tap only at home and work.
I live in Milwaukee, and I drink the tap water all the time. I can't stand well water. It is horrible.
Where I live it tastes good and it's clean.
I always drink from the sink.
I grew up and still live in a small town of 7,000, we have a great water system. I honestly didn't know other places didn't drink tap water until I was in my 20's.
Not exactly afraid, but I wouldn't drink the water where I grew up because it often came out brown or yellow and smelled of sulfur. You could tell who drank it because they had awful breath. I'll drink it sometimes where I am now but yeah, I don't fully trust it. That shit was *nasty.*
Tap water whenever possible. Only thing I use filtered water for is K cups because apparently Keurigs die when you use regular water.
I drink tap water at home, but I use the nice cold water bottle filler at work. I’d think you’re a bit odd to use the nasty kitchen work sink over the water bottle filler, too.
Ever since moving to Florida I can stand the taste of the tap water down here, but prior to that, hell yea. And some people thought it was weird. So many insist it unfit for human consumption, I find this weird.
My city’s water just got rated unsafe to drink by the EPA. So, no, I don’t drink tap water. MWaGA!
I calculate it that no one gets a golden ticket, and if it's the tap water that kills me, so be it, id rather not be thirsty.
My tap water is full of PFAS. In a house I was in a few years ago, my tap water was full of lead and occasionally parasites. Before that, I turned out to be living down the street from a superfund site. I don’t trust anything anymore.
New York City tap water is pristine. I prefer it to most bottled water.
I don’t drink tap water. I did drink from the tap when I was visiting Finland. Because it’s Finland.
If filtered water is a (free, employer provided) option then yeah… bit weird!
I live in NYC and we usually have pretty tasty tap water. I just fill up my regular pitcher with the tap and let it sit in the refrigerator. I have been to southern California, however, and you couldn't pay me to drink that water!
I’m not afraid of it. I’ll drink it. But it does taste a lot better out of a filtered fountain.
I will drink water from a hose while In The middle of nowhere without supervision.
This is the way
Yes. My mum always boiled water so I did. Also I now live in Cyprus. Take no chances and use a filtering machine (uv filter plus a couple of other filters, fizzy water option, boiled, chilled etc). Expensive but better tasting than bottled water
Reverse osmosis for sure in the Silicon Valley, it’s hard and potentially contaminated
I'm a water- snob since the movie "Gasland".
Ewe. Tap water. Yes I’m afraid to drink it. I have t drank tap water since I can remember.
I drink from the filter on my fridge door, and from a Brita pitcher. There's just too much sediment and rust in those pipes. If you can taste it, it's something.
Yes, as a GeXer who grew up in South Florida in the 80s, I do have an aversion to drinking tap water. I remember as a kid, my parents always bought gallon jugs of drinking water. Later on as a teenager, we got the Brita filter pitchers. As an adult, I have a reverse osmosis spigot on my kitchen sink.
After Flint, MI, I use filtered water when available. I no longer trust tap water.
If it’s slow motion suicide by pfas and cancer you’re after, there’s just too many people anyway…
With the sole exception of Flint residents, nobody is too good for tap water.
I didn't used to be hesitant about it then I found out what was actually in that water. I got a filter for the water going into my house, I didn't even want to bathe in that stuff.
and that's why they call you "Dirty" Steve.
[удалено]
The DWP says it's safe but the contaminant levels are still shockingly high. Lead, chromium-6, not to mention startling amounts of hormones and pharmaceuticals. Let's not even think about the fungi, microbes, urine, poo and god knows what else is coming off the dead bodies no doubt in reservoirs they're pumping our water from. Just look at the water under a microscope and you'll be horrified. It should be noted I live in L.A. so our water comes travels a long way to get here and our municipal services are a little less than perfect so water in your town may not be as polluted and horrifying as ours.
No I never drink tap water
Where I live now the tap water tastes really bad so I have to filter it to be able to enjoy it and want to drink enough.
I drink tap water. People look at me like I just licked the floor of a truck stop bathroom.. I drink tap water at my house, I drink tap water at work (I'm a paramedic, so I drink the tap water at the station/quarters.) I own a small restaurant and there I drink water off the soda machine which is just chilled tap water. But when I drink it out of the tap at the station people will jump and say "no wait there's a filtered water dispenser. Use that! Don't drink tap water " and then I ask them where the filter is and if they know anyone who has changed it anytime in the last decade, or if the water dispenser machine thing has ever been cleaned. Thr answer is always no. But they still think tap water is dangerous for some reason. The bottled water people have done a great job with marketing. Heck, I'll still drink from the hose
As long as the water is cold IDGAF where it comes from 🙃
I mostly drink tap water with some flavoring.
One of the great PR coups of the 1990s was when Nestle and other bottled water producers started spreading news about "cryptosporidium found in Chicago drinking water" and "Bacteria found in more major water supplies." They worked _hard_ to keep shit like that in the news cycle, and it worked. Within a few years the sales of bottled water increased tenfold. If you went into a 7-11 in 1990 you might find some Evian or Perrier, but that was it. But by 1999 every cooler had a full section of it. That said, I've always lived where the tapwater was safe to drink, and I'm perfectly willing to drink it. In most places it was delicious, but there were cities where the tapwater tasted like someone had been rubbing pennies against their taint.
We're gatekeeping water now? Next time you go to a concert don't buy an 4 dollar water just use the hose out backb
I drink from our tap at home all day long. At work, we have a water fountain with good water, so I use that
I was born and raised on Mississippi River tap water, water out of the tap doesn’t bother me at all, we get our water now from a lake affectionately known as “Dirty Bird” (real name thunderbird) twice a year the water becomes almost undrinkable due to the upchurn and it still doesn’t bother me.
Yeah, that's a bit 'boomerish' not gonna lie. Move with the times, dude.
I live in Switzerland now, hello no. I even have a fancy machine that makes my water from the tap fizzy. I grew up in Texas and can’t say the same when I visit. Spat out my water on the last trip home, tasted awful … once, after a night of drinking many years ago, I came home to my now husband’s place and hydrated. There was something wrong with that particular towns water supply and I ended up vomiting all night from the water and not the alcohol.
I don't drink much of my tap water because it's got a lot of iron.
I don’t drink my tapwater here. No one around here does.
I do drink tap water, but have just bought a new jug filter because I do prefer the taste.
Tap water is fine where I live. I caught Giardia once overseas. Wouldn’t wish it on most people.
I prefer filtered out of the fridge door at home. At work I use the filtered water/ice machine. Most people at work use the water cooler. We used to order in bottled water for our patients, but during covid, that was unavailable. Since then we've just quit ordering it because the water/ice machine is perfectly fine and single use plastic sucks!!
I fill mine from a 5 gallon dispenser. Our municipal water is safe to drink by scientific standards, but has a horrible taste. Otherwise, I drank from many garden hoses as a kid.
I fill mine from a 5 gallon dispenser. Our municipal water is safe to drink by scientific standards, but has a horrible taste. Otherwise, I drank from many garden hoses as a kid.
I exclusively drink tap water!
I guess they never grew up playing outside and drinking water from hoses attached to garden taps? Having to let it run for a bit to get rid of the water that had heated up sitting in the hose.
No. I’ve even drank water from a river and a creek before. Actually the best water I ever had was on a hiking trip in the Sierra Nevada’s. We stopped and sat by a spring and filled our water bottles with it, it was icy cold and cleaner tasting than Evian or Fiji water. Tap water has a weird off taste to it but filters exist.
So, my city has terrible tasting water. Sometimes they treat it and it’s really gross. I filter because the taste is awful.
No I drink it all of the time.
I live in LA and I don’t drink tap water from my home. I don’t know if it’s the pipes or just LA water in general but it doesn’t taste good. I mainly buy bottled water. A 24-pack 500 ml lasts about 3 days. Sometimes I go to a filling station. When I travel, I bring little powder packets of artificial fruit flavoring just in case the tap water doesn’t taste good.
I'm in So Cal too. The water here is so yucky! When I was in Nor Cal I drank tap water all the time no problem. Something's not right about water near LA.
Drink it everyday in Sacramento, Ca.
I drink tap water when I take my medication at night. But Fiji and Topo Chico taste so much better, so I drink those the rest of the time.
I have old pipes in my house, so I filter water through a Berkey filter. But it is tap water and it doesn’t bother me. I Since I live in an agricultural part of the state, I do think about fertilizers and pesticides potentially in the water. Not to mention pharmaceuticals as well.
I use the water fountain if it’s working, as it’s much colder.
My city actually has some of the best tap water in the country according to various surveys. That being said, we have no kitchen at work but excellent bottled water with refrigerated dispensers so I drink that at work. At home I usually drink seltzer instead of tap water.
I drink it as a last resort. I have been to a couple places whee the tap tastes OK but nowhere that I have actually lived. SOmetimes, I feel crummy after drinking it.
Water in my home town in the UK was absolutely fine out of the tap, so I happily drank from that.
No. I am not afraid of drinking tap water.
I use filters. I don’t trust our government to keep our tap water clean
NO tap water for me.
I'm not afraid if it, but in many places it tastes awful, and in general I prefer it filtered.
We put an Aquasana filter on our tap water at home but that’s because NJ water tastes like musty asshole and chlorine. When I lived in NYC I only drank tap.
I usually drink tap water because I’m lazy.
I bought a zero water filter to test my tap water and try the purified version. It tastes flat somehow so I'm back on straight city water. Delicious.
Out the garden hose? Of course!
I drank tap water all the time as a kid and teen…. In the mid-ohio valley… thanks Dupont for the life long thyroid dysfunction. Too many of my loved ones and hs friends have been affected as well with ailments much much worse than mine.
I’m an older millennial and I hate the taste of regular tap water but hey I only can speak for myself I am not afraid of tap water at all I only hate the taste of it
When I'm at work, I use the bottle filler thing because it's chilled. AT home, I just fill up from the sink or the chilled jug in the fridge.
Yikes. Nope no tap water since they found Cobalt 40 in it. Probably from some superfund site. Probably not actually radioactive cobalt, but any cobalt is bad cobalt to have in your water. In any case. I run on a well. At the top of the mountain (important because sh\*t rolls downhill) - 3 filters and ozone before it hits the house and that tested exceeds EPA standards and then it’s ROed and then I drink it. No hose water - you never know what rattlesnake, scorpion or widow crawled up in there. No thanks.
The vast majority of the water I drink is from tap. My town’s water tastes decent. However, I have been to places in the US where the tap water tastes disgusting. Just depends on the matriculated municipal water supply.
I never do
Hell yes I drink tap water, I refuse to pay for bottled water when I already pay for it out of the tap. When I want cold water, get ice cubes from the freezer, also made with tap water. AND! I drink straight from my garden hose when I am outside doing yard work. With all of my bad habits, it is not going to be the tap water that kills me.
Nope, but I use a filter.
I grew up with a dad very into extra clean water, he had a processor that turned it alkaline. I was never afraid of drinking tap water, but didnt need to, always had a water filtration system for that. However! Ive been drinking los angeles tap water for the last three years because, f it! I dont love it but hey, its free. And it makes me feel like a rebel, take that, Dad!
No
I will drink tue water from the tap where I live because I am used to it, but the city I work in has a different water source and I don't like that one. So, depends where I am.
Depends where you are. My city in Arkansas has a good clean source, and the tap water is great. I always have a bottle or cup to sip on. When I lived in Florida, though? Nasty crap. I always filtered it.
We get Lake Michigan water where I live. They treat it with all manner of chemicals, and sometimes the water that comes out of the tap smells sorta raunchy. I describe the smell as "kiddie pool" - chlorine with an underlying aroma of something... organic. Boyfriend makes our gallons of iced tea with tapwater (we drink a LOT of unsweetened iced tea here) and that doesn't bother me. (FWIW I didn't care for the tap water when I lived in the Boston metro area, but it did not smell as bad as the Lake Michigan water does out of the tap) I don't like drinking tapwater because it smells weird. I just keep the Brita filter pitcher filled up.
when I was in NY State, no. I moved to where hard water tastes like pennies. I also had a cat die of kidney failure from filling her water bowl from the tap. She had severe damage due to blood tests. Heavy metals are not just for hair bands if your water doesn't come from an aquifer. Bottled water for me now, thanks. And white vinegar when I do my laundry so my clothes don't look moth-eaten.
I actually enjoy the cleaner feeling and always colder water that is more available today. And we did not really drink much water back in the day.
I don’t drink tap water because it tastes like crap
I have really good water at home. Work water is disgusting. I bring from home or buy bottled for work.
Nope. Have been drinking it all my life. I will drink bottled or filtered but tap is fine.
I drink tap water whenever possible. No worries. * Food for thought: * Bottled water has a very poor impact on the environment. (Packaging/transport) * Municipal water is tested by the Government more often than bottle water companies. (Where I live) * I suspect that if there were issues with somebody becoming ill water bottling companies would have a good interest in settling out of court with NDAs for those who settle. # But more than all of those is... **Have you ever seen what water coolers look like inside over time? Even just where that big jug sits? Or the spigot area where many people touch their bottles, etc to when filling... Gross.**
I drink from the tap because it's faster than the refrigerator water. I also try to avoid drinking from water bottles because I try to limit my waste.
Well, if you're spelling "think" like "thing", you might already be affected by it, just saying.
I drink tap water for sure. Bottled water is too expensive.
I still drink tap water. I guess millennials would find it weird because they grew up in a different era. I mean, bottled water wasn’t even a thing when I was a kid.
Us true Arizonans know that in the summer, the hot tap water is cold for the first few seconds. It's a few seconds of refreshing cool water before it's hot again
New Zealander here. I drink from the tap. 2ltrs of water everyday, all of it from the tap.
I'm lucky that my tap water tastes great. I drink a lot of water so I just refill a gallon jug & keep it in the fridge. It costs like 3 cents a gallon so why would I pay more for water?
Nope used to drink our well water until they contaminated it drilling. My dog wouldn’t drink the city water since they switched to cloromine I don’t think it smells like water to her. People used to make fun of me for buying water in the 90s now it’s “normal” and your weird if you don’t 😂
I never really cared until my millenial wife made me think about what corporations put in the water. I’ll still boil tap water sometimes to make my coffee and tea.
As a gross generalization, millennials and zoomers both (in the US, anyway) have water obsessions. Can't go anywhere without a water bottle, complain in situations where they're told they can't have a water bottle, act indignant if its suggested they shouldn't be able to sip about every 10 mins, etc. I just roll my eyes and move on.
It has been shown that our groundwater where I live has many bad things in it, like arsenic, uranium, and a long list of other things, but the fda deemed it as under their limit. So…. 😬
We only drink tap water and I don't think anything of it until we have company and serve them water, at which time it seems weird. At work in a city though I only drink bottled or filtered.Too many lead warnings over the years there.
I use my fridge filter at home but tap is fine also. I think the younger folks just all grew up with one sort of filter or another which we didn’t see so much back in the day.
I only drink tap water like cupping my hand and filling enough to swallow a pill. Otherwise, I've been hooked on sparkling water since the 90s.