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Comment by determinateproc | Hacker News Reader

How common is the use of water purifiers in the West? Here in India, in my observation, most middle class and above families own a household water filter of some sort (electrical or otherwise) and routinely fill up bottles for drinking purposes. Drinking straight from the tap is something very uncommon.

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It will vary by household and with 330M people you will be able to find a group doing anything you can imagine so beware folks trying to prescribe their lives experience as representative of Americans in general.

In my household we do not trust the tap and would never drink from it directly. We have something called hard water here and came here from New Mexico where our tap was frequently brown. Both were “safe” to drink, but we choose to drink neither directly.

We buy 20 ounce water bottles from the grocery store which are filled from the “local” spring. We keep a Brita water filter pitcher in our fridge that we fill out of the tap and replace the filter on regularly. Generally we each open a new bottle in the morning and then refill it from the brita filter for the remainder of the day.

San Francisco gets its water from Hetch Hetchy, it follows an almost entirely pristine granite pathway from the reservoir to the city. Moved here from Chicago, a city directly abutting the largest freshwater lakes in the world.

I drink directly from the tap, and grew up trusting my access to water. Now, I'm aware that not everyone has that privilege and our government, increasingly neoliberal and enamored with privatization and fracking, has allowed the public freshwater infrastructure to degrade in various parts of the country that didn't previously have problems with their tap water.

It's one of the first questions I ask when I visit someone else now. It's probably the greatest modern civilizational decline.

It depends on a country. A lot of people think that just because it's from a bottle, it's safer. In many countries,the quality of bottled water isn't regulated,or not regulated as much as the tap water. I lived in 4 different countries in Europe and always drank tap water.My own country is one of few in the world, where tap water is supplied pretty much exclusively from underground sources,so no purified river/lake water.

A lot of people mention Brita filters, which is an activated carbon filter, however a lot of households would probably benefit more from limescale filters.

In Michigan drinking from the tap is pretty universal, unless you live in a rural area with a well. Being in the middle of a couple large freshwater lakes gives you delicious water.

That said, water purification is big business. People have filtered water pitchers (think Brita) or large units that supply the whole house (Culligan)

Depends on the well also. Nestle has a huge bottling plant in Evart that uses well water.

Of course. Many wells have quality water while some will turn your clothes and appliances orange

The most well-known filter brand in the US is Brita which is a pitcher you buy with a replaceable filter. Costs around $20 per filter which last "2-6 months". Probably an order of magnitude more expensive than what you pay in India. It's definitely as a very middle-class thing in US; and to the extent it removes minerals and flouride from the water its arguably detrimental (tap water is generally trusted to be safe.)

Oddly, I recall that the "workaround" solution being to the Flint crisis was to ship in tons of bottled water. Cheap filters, if they remove lead and bacteria fully, would seem like a much more cost effective way.

Costco sells 10 packs of their filters for $30 and they're good for 40 gallons, same as brita. their pitchers are the same size as Brita for $25.

I'm not sure what the West is, but I live in eastern europe and I have no idea what an electric purifier would even look like. Someone might order bottled water at a restaurant, but I'm pretty sure everyone drinks tap at home.

From what I've seen Germans seems pretty suspicious of their tap water(or maybe just hard water?) and use brita filters a lot. There is no actual health benefit or harm avoidance for using them as far as I understand.

> I have no idea what an electric purifier would even look like

Here are some of the popular brands that you can get over here:

https://www.eurekaforbes.com/water-purifiers/by-category/aqu...

https://www.kent.co.in/

These claim to use RO, UV etc. for purifying the water. I am kind of surprised that the Amazon USA listings for water purifiers return several fad-ish "gadget" things first, instead of the above.

I won't name my city (in the South East US), but we have high quality water. I have zero problem drinking from the tap. In fact, I would probably move if I had to use a filter.

I'd imagine it varies from country to country and by locality a bit, but I've lived in Australia and several spots in the US; at each tap water was routinely drunk.

In the Northeast US and west coast of US, I’ve never used a water purifier.

I used one, once... for the hatchet fishes.

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