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Comment by em3rgent0rdr | Hacker News Reader

If you want to keep it simple, don't even bother with filtered water and just drink out of the tap. It is safe in the developed world. If you are concerned about germs, which can get through the filter anyway, you should boil the water instead.

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That really isn't a good assumption. The West is undergoing a bureaucratic collapse where incompetent or out right maliciously corrupt people are subverting regulators.

I dont trust regulators and have a five stage reverse under the sink filter. Result? In the last five years in my little section of the midwest:

- I've dodged Pb poisoning when my local water authority switched corrosion inhibitors (note, this is after Flint MI)

- I've dodged vinyl chloride poisoning from the Palestine OH fire that Federal regulators pretended was a nothing burger until dead cows started showing up everywhere.

Not to mention the countless times the lines are fixed and the water comes out brown (this is "safe" because it's iron oxide. Except it is only mostly iron oxide plus all the crud that has caked onto the pipes.)

Best case scenario I trust the regulators. Even then F- ups happen and Id rather have a filter I keep myself.

Yes, and it’s a good idea to not trust bottled water as well. You could have some grandpa in Nevada having his own ideas how « Real water » should taste. And then its gets grandfathered and sold at WholeFoods.

https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/10/jury-awards-229m-to-v...

I avoid bottled water too. A PhD in mtls science on plastics will do that to you.

You could move to my small village in New Mexico and join the water board. There's about 70 of us on the water system, and we could use more people to help provide oversight. The well itself is about 500 yards from my front door, and the water tank and pump house are right up the hill, I go by them on most morning walks.

No thanx. Spanish cartographers were very clear about the suitability of the Southwest to sustain human life:

Ari-zona. Zona Arida.

> McClintock concluded that the name probably derived from a native place name that sounded like Aleh-zon or Ali-Shonak, which meant “small spring” or “place of the small spring.”

https://azlibrary.gov/collections/dazl/arizona-almanac/meani...

Humans have documented remains close to this village going back 4000 years, and likely were here much longer than that. The creek has (so far, even in the worst drought in 1200 years) never stopped flowing.

> The West is undergoing a bureaucratic collapse where incompetent or out right maliciously corrupt people are subverting regulators.

I don't know where you're getting this from. Generally speaking, regulations and enforcement are tighter than they've ever been. That doesn't mean they're perfect, but you're going to have to show some evidence it's getting worse.

I really don't think you want to go back to the 1970's and 1980's, or the 1940's and 1950's.

I mean, I totally believe you about your water -- I just don't know where you get the idea that it was better in the past. If anything, you as a consumer just didn't have the ability to detect it or filter.

I didn't complain that there aren't enough regulations. I mean that the people involved in them are corrupt and incompetent which makes them easy prey to the industries they regulate.

That's why I didn't say "regulations", I said "regulations and enforcement".

Corruption has generally gone down significantly over the decades, and knowledge and training have gone up.

I'm not saying there aren't problems, but you're presenting a narrative where bureaucracies are "collapsing", when the reality is that things have actually been improving in general, and quite a great deal.

I wouldn't be so sure:

The Royal Society of Chemistry is calling on the UK Government to overhaul its drinking water standards, after new analysis reveals more than a third of water courses tested in England and Wales contain medium or high-risk levels of PFAS, more commonly known as forever chemicals.

https://www.rsc.org/news-events/articles/2023/oct/pfas-clean...

Is an activated charcoal filter like in a fridge or Brita or something enough to filter out that kind of contaminant?

No.

Brita filters also have ion exchange resin as well as activated charcoal. However it's not enough to remove PFAS, there was a lawsuit about this, if you do a search.

my understanding is not as much and not as consistently as more advanced filters

I don't know. We have started using Epic Pure filters. They claim to filter PFOA/PFOS [1].

Don't take this as a recommendation though. I have no expertise in this at all and I haven't done any tests to confirm whether Epic's claims are actually true.

https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/1681/3573/files/Epic_Pure_...

Same for Lifestraw pitcher https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/2631/0778/files/Performanc...

It's not about germs, it's about the taste -- it's about removing chlorine.

I personally don't like my water to taste like diluted swimming pool. After the first time I tried a blind tasting of tap water vs. Brita-filtered at home, I never drank straight from the tap again.

The problem isn't safety , but taste. I'm 100% onboard and don't have any problems drinking tap [in the US].

However, most people now base how water tastes from bottled water. So the preference at home is to not drink off the tap.

The taste depends on the quality of water and what sort of chemicals they deliberately put in the water to keep it "safe" for human consumption.

Here in Sweden and many other European countries, the tap water is indistinguishable from bottled water.

Haha you've never been to San Francisco. The tap water there is this nasty opaque sludge. It comes out of the faucet looking like bathwater after the bath has been used. Knowing the way things go there, they probably turned their water treatment facilities into Roman style bathhouses that could serve as shelters for the homeless.

That sounds a whole lot like a you problem, presumably due to old pipes in your building or whatever. Most SF water comes from Hetch Hetchy and is clean enough at the source that it's not required to be filtered. My experience over a few decades is that San Francisco's tap water is about the best tasting in the nation.

https://tappwater.co/blogs/blog/can-you-drink-san-francisco-...

I live in an area with high levels of PFAS in the water, so this isn't always true.

I’d be shocked if home appliance filters are capable of filtering PFAS anyways.

RO definitely does. Other filters can as well, but maybe not as well. https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/14/health/pfas-water-filters-wel...

A RO undersink system costs $200 dollars. And it blocks everything but dissolved gasses.

Only downside with RO is it uses more water, but depending on water quality and cost it is often wirth it. Over on the carbon filter side there is KX media, which does a redox reaction and can kill giardiasis and help with slight contamination. It also does a great job against chlorine but chloramine is harder to filter.

If you live in my corner of the USofA the concept of "wasting" water is meaningless. I actually posed this question to an LA water conservation engineer guy. He didn't know how you could possibly water here.

I don't want the chemicals they add, so until my well is put in, I use a countertop carbon filter.

“Safe” by the EPA’s standards

i don't want my water to have metal taste, so i use filters. if you care about germs, it's easier to drop some silver in the water. boiling uses too much energy

It should be safe, but a lot of areas have aging infrastructure and related problems (think Flint). Other areas mess with the water, in some areas of the UK the water is fluoridated, on paper it's to improve dental health, but a conspiracy theory is that it's cheaper to use humans as cheap filters instead of dispose of excess fluoride in a managed fashion.

Also, "the developed world" is a very polarising statement to make.

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