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Comment by toephu2 | Hacker News Reader

San Francisco Bay Area tap water is safe to drink and is held to a lot higher safety standard than bottled water. Also the source of most bottled-water is no different than the source for tap. Bottled-water is often priced at a 2000%+ markup.

http://sfwater.org/index.aspx?page=447

https://www.quora.com/Is-San-Francisco-city-tap-water-safe-t...

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Sure. Safe to drink but most Bay Area water tastes damn awful.

I can’t stand drinking tap water in the Bay unless it is ice cold.

Some bottled water tastes bad too. Getting the stuff that isn’t bottled anywhere near california always seems to taste better.

I use a 6 stage water filtration system and it is a life saver. I didn’t drink water regularly at all in the Bay until I had that. Still don’t drink much water at most restaurants here...

I’m not a defender of bottled water but let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that all bottled water is equal to tap water. Especially SF tap water. It definitely isn’t. Some actually tastes decent.

What filtration system do you use? I've got the same problem in the L.A. area and wouldn't mind checking something out (a simple brita filter doesn't do much for it).

Why don't Japanese style water tap filter systems [1] get popular in the west? These things are incredibly convenient and cheap - your tap water now tastes good, the upfront cost is ~35 USD and the running cost is at most around 3 USD per month. Hell of a lot cheaper and easier than buying water bottles and transporting them around.

[1] http://gd.image-gmkt.com/li/089/310/525310089.g_0-w_g.jpg

I've seen these around Europe. Also, a larger version where the filter is under the counter.

America != The west.

Well I'm from Europe and I haven't. Where have you seen them more specifically? In Switzerland they don't make a lot of sense (good tasting water, but very calcium-heavy which these AFAIK don't help against). But e.g. in France and Italy I think it would make a lot of sense, the water there is AFAIK safe but tastes awful to me.

I have seen these things occasionally in Europe. It's not a strictly Japanese thing.

Scandinavia and Britain.

It's not something I'd buy -- the water here has an extremely high mineral content, but isn't that what people pay extra for when it's put in a glass bottle? -- but there are some available on Amazon.co.uk if you search "filter tap".

I got this on sale for about $160. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005LJ8EXU/ref=oh_aui_sear...

I drink several cups of water per day straight out of the tap in San Francisco, and have done so for about 6 years. It tastes fine to me, which is to say it doesn’t taste like anything. I also have a water filter and pitcher that I keep in my fridge, and while ice cold water is certainly nicer, it’s rarely worth the trouble for me to refill it. I’m curious why you think the water tastes bad straight from the tap, and even more curious if you would be able the distinguish it from your preferred water source in a blind taste test.

Have you ever had water from anywhere else? The minerals in the bay area water or whatever the chemical difference is makes it awful compared to tap water elsewhere.

>even more curious if you would be able the distinguish it from your preferred water source in a blind taste test.

Of course you would. Tap water isn't purified in any regard to only contain hydrogen and oxygen. It's filled with all kinds of other crap with just certain crap removed.

It doesn't seem completly rational to say "all kinds of other crap", but maybe I'm wrong and you have examples of which kind of craps. Tap water is usually enough regulated for it to be safe to drink.

There is a huge variety of minerals that are perfectly fine to leave in drinking water.

You're right that it's regulated to be safe to drink, but safety has nothing to do with taste.

I grew up with well water from the Midwest, which oddly enough is claimed by many to be very tasty because of its mineral content (but bad for pipes and appliances). I’ve also heard people say that distilled water actually tastes bad or uncomfortable precisely because it is very nearly just hydrogen and oxygen. I’m still skeptical that there’s any difference that could be discerned in a blind test.

To people who regularly drink very mineralized spring water, there's a huge difference. Spring water tastes almost like milk.

"Minerals" is a blanket category. That's like saying that you'll like flour water because you like sugar water because they're both fall into the category of carbs.

The difference is significant. I lived in Cleveland, OH for awhile, and their city has some of the best tap water in the nation. Did a stint in the Bay Area and the difference is immediately noticeable, and this was before anyone brought it up to me or I had read about it, so there was no chance of being influenced by prior opinion.

This. I lived around Bay Area a long time and I couldn't drink the water without running it through a filtration system first. It doesn't have the worst tasting water of the many places I've lived (parts of southern California win that award) but it is objectively pretty poor which is why so many people there drink filtered/bottled water. Parts of California have real problems with minerality that adversely affect flavor even in the bottled versions.

By contrast, the tap water in Seattle and many parts of the Pacific Northwest tastes excellent, about the same as drinking it directly from the springs up in the mountains whence it came. Consequently, people rarely drink bottled water in that region; you can't materially improve the flavor of what comes out of the tap.

While some of the difference is in the local mineral balance, which can be quite unpleasant in some locales (e.g. in close proximity to active volcanic areas in the mountain West), in most regions the unpleasantness comes down to the chemical treatment required to make the water safe based on the default quality of the watershed.

It's been a few years since I lived there, but San Mateo had pretty tasty water.

Water at my current home in Oakland has excellent tap water. I think the difference is that some water in the Bay Area comes from close to pristine surface sources, and is very good, while others come from ground water. The quality of groundwater will vary a lot; from great to very bad (or event toxic if you have your own well and an underground plume of waste dumped by an old chip factory comes your way).

I think Bay Area's tap water tastes fine. To each his own.

Just a couple of weeks ago people in Alameda couldn't even bathe in the tap water. That's not a great testament to the quality of bay area water.

https://alamedaca.gov/wateralert

That affected about 230 homes who were not EBMUD customers. It's fixed now. Somebody connected an irrigation well to the potable water system.

(Agricultural areas often have both non-potable and potable water systems. Stanford does, incidentally. Stanford has a private water system, with Felt Lake as a reservoir. It's mostly used to irrigate the golf course and lawns.)

[1] https://alamedaca.gov/waterfaq

I wouldn't be so sure, within the last year it's now "Hechy Hech mixed with groundwater", you may have seen the pre-emptive advertising on buses when they rolled it out. My feeling is that it is probably worse than it used to be.

It also tastes like crap. In Vancouver the tap water tastes as good as bottled. The only thing better is fresh from a mountain creek.

Most bottled "spring water" is tap water that is pumped in a few yards away from the "spring" and then bubbles up, legally now "spring water."

I don't believe there's any legal requirement for that. I know there is no legally required notification of the water's source, as that was a bit of a debate topic locally and just a few years ago.

San Francisco's tap water is pumped from Yosemite. It tastes great to me. There now enough water there for all of the Bay area, so in many municipalities (e.g. Sunnyvale, I think) water tastes terrible.

In case you haven't seen this before, worth a look: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hetch_Hetchy#Hetch_Hetchy_Pr...

"Water from Hetch Hetchy is some of the cleanest municipal water in the United States; San Francisco is one of six U.S. cities not required by law to filter its tap water, although the water is disinfected by ozonation and, since 2011, exposure to UV.[58] The water quality is high because of the unique geology of the upper Tuolumne River drainage basin, which consists mostly of bare granite; as a result, the rivers feeding Hetch Hetchy Reservoir have extremely low loads of sediments and nutrients."

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