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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

Fun little article, but I find the overall premise a bit weird. I always thought of water filters as something that you use to remove harmful things in the water, not improve the taste. Filtered water may taste different, possibly even better, but that's not the goal when I use one.

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I have lived in cities where the tap water, to me, was undrinkably gross tasting. It was probably just fine to drink, but I found myself drinking less water than I should because of the taste. A Brita filter helped a lot.

Edit: and not all cities I've lived in are that way. In my current city the tap water is just fine.

The two times I've made major moves in my life I thought the new water tasted awful. In both cases I acclimated and the water was tasteless within a month or two.

My parents have used a Brita filter for years.

For them it started out because they were fed up of descaling the kettle, as they live in a very hard water area (lots of dissolved minerals) and the kettle would scale up easily. But they also always use the filtered water for drinking, because they prefer the taste now.

My sister doesn't, she drinks it straight from the tap when she's visiting.

But it's not at all about water safety. It's just about flavour and the longevity of the kettle (and the iron).

Not in the US. The vast majority of US tap water is perfectly safe to drink. The only reason to filter it is taste.

For me, it's a hedge against incompetence by the local utility (e.g. Flint), a hedge against problems with my own plumbing, and (for the most part) to shut up that part of my brain that worries too much.

It's definitely my goal -- I assume my water's perfectly healthy, but removing the chlorine makes a world of difference in terms of taste.

But I live in a city. If you're in the country and drink well water, your priorities might be the complete opposite.

Some well water also has a very high iron content which could taste good to some but to others it tastes overwhelmingly metallic. This is the case in a lot of mountain areas where drilling deeper than normal to hit a purer part of the aquifer is more expensive.

These two things are not necessarily uncorrelated.

Right, but neither are they necessarily correlated, and they might even be correlated oppositely.

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