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Comment by thfuran | Hacker News Reader

If the water was already hot because I was doing something else, I'll make soup or pasta with a pot of hot water. If the kitchen were closer to my water heater, I'd do it more consistently.

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You're never supposed to cook with hot tap water. Even if lead is not a concern, there are other possible contaminants that can leech from plastic and copper pipes, or from the tank itself.

This is not taught in the US and we blend hot and cold together. Why are the lines blended at the faucet if that’s the case?

There's a lot that's not formally taught in the US. But I'm in the US and this is a thing. The blended faucets are fine. If it was set to hot or some blend with hot in it, you set it to cold and let it run for 1-3 seconds.

No, it’s blended because hot water is fine in the US. We don’t use hot water tanks that sit on rooftops and accumulate bird shit.

If you ever find yourself cleaning the inside of a hot water heater some day, it will disabuse you of that habit.

I'm sure it's mostly harmless, but they accumulate a truly horrific amount of mineral deposits and other weird gunk in there.

They accumulate gunk that was present in the cold water supply.

If its not quite hot enough you can end up having a nice incubator for bacteria

Yes, but water coming from the cold water tap has spent less time sitting in that accumulated stuff.

There can't be more minerals coming out than what went in though. It's not like calcium grows. Maybe it might break off and come out as some concentrated chunks, but overall there would have to be less coming out for it to accumulate in the tank.

Seems like the presence of the accumulated gunk in the cylinder means the hot water must be cleaner by definition? The accumulation being the net difference between what was dissolved in the incoming water and what is dissolved in the outgoing water.

With the exception of gunk that is from the lining of the cylinder itself of course.

Yeah, so the gunk has less time to fall out of the cold water.

Looking inside a kettle in London provides the same experience (at least when I lived there).

Now we live on rain water and the inside of the kettle is pristine, despite bird crap on our roof and flora in the guttering.

For things like an instapot where you add a cup of water to it, you are actually supposed to use distilled water. I used tap for years with mine and got all sorts of mineralization. It took quite a bit of vinegar to get that off, and now everything looks pristine since I have been using distilled water. You might consider using it for your next kettle, although perhaps the minerals in tap do something to the taste of the tea.

Do you buy hundreds of liters of distilled water? That doesnt sound practical

That's why modern kettles can be cleaned. I clean the mineral deposits out of mine once a year or so.

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