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Comment by wcunning | Hacker News Reader

The Gelman plume near Ann Arbor had wells way over that limit and this is probably going to affect the city water supply since the plume is getting close to the Huron River where Ann Arbor draws water from. That's part of why I moved towards Detroit when I bought instead of west of town. Now I should get my water tested in Oakland County, since I'm still on a well and who knows what's going on this close to I-696. Do you know if there's testing resources?

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If you don’t want ti deal with doing the testing yourself, the EPA has a list of certified labs that can test your water for you. If you follow the link, you’ll find Michigan’s cert program and a list of contact info for those labs.

I’ve never done it myself, so I don’t have a sense of how expensive it would be.

https://www.epa.gov/dwlabcert/contact-information-certificat...

That EPA site more than obtuse. It's impossible to find a company that has a service that will mail you a container, have you add the water to it, then send it back to them to have them test it.

The closest I found was: https://www.meritlabs.com/sample-bottle-order but there are not even prices and it appears that you have to be more or less an industry expert to even fill out the order form.

Someone should make a startup like 23andMe but for water. Lots of us would pay $500 to have water accurately tested. Especially if the data could be aggregated and made pubic.

https://mytapscore.com/

I've used them and been happy with the report. Happy to share if requested.

Does it report on microplastics too? What about still "unofficial" PFAS

https://gosimplelab.com/ZM7S1O is my report. I found their UI/UX quite good, and very comparable to a 23andMe experience. Pleasantly surprised to say there were zero attempts at ongoing subscription upsells, reengagement, virality etc.

Since my collection was based on a plastic bottle, I doubt microplastics would be part of the report. However the same lab offers other tests with different collection containers and different assays.

https://mytapscore.com/pages/specialized https://mytapscore.com/products/pfas-water-test https://mytapscore.com/products/microplastics-water-test

since the back end testing and reporting is done through gosimplelab you might wish to look at their offerings more directly https://gosimplelab.com/solutions/pfas

Doesnt seem to have pfas in any of the standard city water test batteries. I'd also like to see microplastics and medicines (hormones, antibiotics etc) in a test.

I think PFAS is actually hard to test for because you'd have to remove any added fluoride salts etc, and then use spectrometry. And microplastics is expensive to test for because it requires human evaluation through a microscope

thank you

A la carte menu: https://mytapscore.com/pages/specialized

A+

Maybe get a home still. It's basically just a big coffee pot that boils the water into a carafe. It takes about 3 hours to do gallon. Since it's all metal and glass there's no plastics in the output, unlike filters that often have a small plastic filter for the smallest particles that can end up introducing plastic in the output water.

Do you have any suggestions? The ones that I'm seeing when I search appear to be pretty involved.

I'm using one of these https://www.h2olabs.com/p-54-white-baked-enamel-model-300-wa...

I just fill it like a coffee maker at night and run it while I'm asleep. Fresh water in the morning, then I'll fill it again after breakfast and run it during the day.

Do you somehow remineralize the water? I thought drinking distilled water long term is bad for you?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distilled_water#Drinking_dis...

I feel comfortable getting all my calcium, magnesium, and iron through my daily amount of vegetables. I don't think I'm lacking in any of those that the trace amounts added to drinking water will help me.

From your article:

"Distillation removes all minerals from water. This results in demineralised water, which has not been proven to be healthier than drinking water. The World Health Organization investigated the health effects of demineralised water in 1982, and its experiments in humans found that demineralised water increased diuresis and the elimination of electrolytes, with decreased serum potassium concentration.[citation needed] Magnesium, calcium, and other nutrients in water can help to protect against nutritional deficiency. Recommendations for magnesium have been put at a minimum of 10 mg/L with 20–30 mg/L optimum; for calcium a 20 mg/L minimum and a 40–80 mg/L optimum, and a total water hardness (adding magnesium and calcium) of 2–4 mmol/L. At water hardness above 5 mmol/L, higher incidence of gallstones, kidney stones, urinary stones, arthrosis, and arthropathies have been observed.[citation needed] For fluoride the concentration recommended for dental health is 0.5–1.0 mg/L, with a maximum guideline value of 1.5 mg/L to avoid dental fluorosis.[17]"

I have gotten used to the taste of my Zerowater filter and so I got worried when I saw your comment. Maybe its better to drink the clean water and supplement with electrolytes and vitamins/minerals. That way you control all the parameters vs leaving it up to chance.

No need to panic. I also use a Zerowater filter. I'd be worried about drinking distilled water after exercising or in high heat because it can lead to hyponatremia -- low blood sodium levels (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercise-associated_hyponatrem...). Because your body is sweating, you're losing a lot of salt that your body needs. Drinking distilled water will pull even more solute out of those cells as the solute chases water (i.e. the cells are hypertonic) until its in steady state, but of course it needs to replenish what has been

However, during normal daily activity and by eating, you're supplementing your body with enough salt (and other solutes) to compensate for what isn't in your distilled water.

Now it's a totally different question whether we're getting PFAs out of our water with the Zerowater filters. That should rightfully incite some panic.

>Now it's a totally different question whether we're getting PFAs out of our water with the Zerowater filters. That should rightfully incite some panic.

They recently sent me an email claiming that they remove 95% of PFOA and PFOS

https://zerowater.com/pages/results

I am an avid athlete and spend a lot of time sweating outdoors. I already have to supplement regular tap water with additional sodium and potassium, so it's no change for me to supplement my distilled water with slightly more. An earlier comment I said I don't add anything, which is usually true, but I do add those minerals when I'm bringing water for exercise.

I went with a still because I wanted to be sure it's "just water". I feel like even if it did filter out the microplastics there's some other things it won't, so the simplest thing was just to ensure it's only water. No lead, no plastics, no plastic filters, no mercury, etc.

I would be worried only if on some obscure long term diet of minimal food and excessive amounts of such water. Imagine how much stuff you are getting with all your regular meals into your stomach, it mixes immediately all up and makes that rather pure water much less pure.

Why so long for just a gallon. You can boil out a gallon of water in about 70 minutes on a regular home stove.

Electric stoves get dedicated high-power circuits, these things plug into a regular wall socket. They just don't have the same power.

Do you mean 7 minutes? Taking 70 min to boil only 1 Gal of water sounds extremely long.

It takes way more heat to change liquid water to a gas than to bring liquid water from 0 °C to 100 °C.

> the molecules in liquid water are held together by relatively strong hydrogen bonds, and its enthalpy of vaporization, 40.65 kJ/mol, is more than five times the energy required to heat the same quantity of water from 0 °C to 100 °C

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthalpy_of_vaporization#Therm...

Oh thanks.

I'm aware of that, but I didn't realize "boil out" (turning all to stream) means something different from "boil" (to just heat to reach boil point or rolling boil).

I have exactly this concern about microplastics.

Can you share your preferred tools for boiling the water? Seems simple enough but at this point I'm very skeptical of online claims, so always prefer something the HN crowd has examined in detail.

I'm in the process of getting rid of my beloved goerge foreman out out concern of the mon sticky surface as well...

I'm using a https://www.h2olabs.com/p-54-white-baked-enamel-model-300-wa...

But there's plenty of other ones out there. I liked that one because it's simple and seems unlikely to break soon.

Beyond testing, I would recommend installing a reverse osmosis filter for your drinking water. I install RO filters for all my drinking water regardless if I am in the Bay Area (The Bay Area can have some pretty freaky hot zones of contamination), well, city water, other parts of the country.

Any concerns about the nanoplastics that commercial RO filters appear to create [0]?

[0] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2300582121

Concerns yes but the better of two evils. I have not tested this consistently but I have leaned towards rather having the plastic contaminants from the RO system than whatever was upstream of the RO. It might be the wrong choice but after living the Bay Area I became too aware of how easy it is for contaminated water to show up from local hot spots.

Edit: What I would add is I often ponder how much additional nanoplastics are getting added compared to what is being removed. I know some of the test suggest RO is adding more but I am not sure if it accounts for the complete life cycle in a bottling plant. For the near term I have just settled that nanoplastics are the lesser evil to me than PFAS and other chemicals within the water. It is scare mongering but I look at how that town in Oregon I believe had has wide spread PFAS contamination in ground water from the airport fire foam.

iirc, it's not clear what filters were used commercially, based on this article and how exactly it translated to residential system where filters working under much lower pressures

I'm not too worried. They were looking at bottled water. My home system isn't the same one they were testing. It's similar, it might have similar problems. But I also don't know how often those filters are changed. My filters last 6 months, I would imagine it sheds most of the plastic right away, and you are suppose to drain the first couple gallons. The other components are rarely switched out, only when they break. Overall, I would think a home system sheds less. Also strung out through that entire article is the fact that all water has plastics. So at this point we are sorta screwed. Pick your poison, chemicals and plastic in your water, or mostly plastic...

Where in the Bay Area have you seen contamination?

Lots of cities in Alameda, San Mateo, and Santa Clara counties get their water from San Francisco Public Utilities, which owns large water rights both in the Bay Area and large watersheds in the Sierra Nevadas such as Hetch Hetchy.

SFPUC water is so clean it is not legally required to be filtered though it does go through ozone treatment to eliminate microbes. Much of the Hetch Hechy watershed, especially the upper Tuolumne, is bare granite so the water doesn't even pick up sediment or surface contaminates. SFPUC enforced removal of all lead water lines in the 1980s so there shouldn't be that risk (which was a real one given some buildings date from the 1800s in SF).

In short if you live in SF or one of the cities that buys their water from SF you shouldn't need reverse osmosis or any other filtering.

Right, the source of the water is clean but the destinations are not. The Bay Area is dotted with a large number of super fund sites due to the historical chemical, semiconductor/circuit board industry. Even a larger number of sites that are not deemed superfund but are similar. All these electronic companies were more or less dumping their various solvents and de-greasers into the ground. Impacting both ground water and soil. Most of those chemicals penetrate both water pipes and in vapor form come up through the slab of the homes/offices built on top.

Often as these business shutdown they built offices and homes on top of the property, for the ones that happened in the 70s there was no remediation until much later. For the ones that happened in the 90s-00s there was a level of remediation but I am still not trustworthy of it 1) lasting and 2) the developers doing the best work.

So its not a "in short" story unless you are completely ignoring the large amounts of trichloroethylene contamination that is in still so much of the ground soil in the bay area. Sure if you live inside of SF proper you are probably fine in most of the residential areas as there was no manufacturing but areas like Bayview can be just as bad and you have the radioactive contamination on top of chemical. If you live anywhere in the south bay or east bay, you probably should at the very least get an idea of what was built near your office/home. Maybe test your water or just throw an RO on it. So many of these companies were dumping trichloroethylene and perchloroethylene in the south/east bay and we just built homes on top of them. They are indeed generally localized hot spots but when I realized how many were near me it opened my eyes. I remember years ago this was an issue at one of the google campus offices because it too had significant ground contamination.

https://www.epa.gov/superfund-redevelopment/superfund-sites-... - Even the homes built in later years have had problems with vapors contamination even though it was built with prevention in mind. You can see the other super fund sites there.

I cannot find the map now but there are even a larger number of DTSC cleanup projects from the bay area. Kind of surprising someone would ask where is the contamination when it literally is dotting the whole bay area.

> Often as these business shutdown they built offices and homes on top of the property, for the ones that happened in the 70s there was no remediation until much later. For the ones that happened in the 90s-00s there was a level of remediation but I am still not trustworthy of it 1) lasting and 2) the developers doing the best work.

There was a investigative story some time back, about somebody that had bought a residence on one of those superfund sites.

It wasn't after his (or her? I don't remember) family started getting sick, and after investigation that he discovered the housing project was built on a superfund site. And even after paying for air measurements out-of-pocket, and with results off-the-chart, the promoter and the town were all saying everything was fine, with nothing to see. And I believe they were also trying to sue him for libel, as you normally do...

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