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Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

> they never considered the chlorine as part of the purifying process, simply precautionary

In many parts of the world they do not add chlorine. Our water tastes and smells like a swimming pool in comparison.

I live in a very rural area in NJ, 90% of residents are on well water. We live in an area where a lot of fractured bedrock, the fractures serve as natural filtration. Net result is our water tastes great with no chlorine or other filtration.

Caveats - you need to ensure your well is deep enough to avoid surface contaminants, ours is about 180 feet deep. Also you need testing for new wells, as an example a few miles from us there is heavy arsenic concentrations that need to be filtered out.

We do. As a result, if we cook or make tea with tap water, you get a hot swimming pool smelling liquid in your cup/bowl.

I've also heard about it being done conditionally, only when problems with bacterial contamination are detected (of course this requires a stringent testing regime).

Yeah, that does not make much sense to me. (Unless the producers of bottled water are in on this).

In europe one can mostly dring good water from the tab. Only in some places (e.g. most of spain) chlorine is added and the difference is horrible. I could not drink that from the tap (and the spanish also buy bottled water as far as I know).

From what I gather (anyone feel free to correct me) the US doesn't have as good programs or regulations to protect drinking water sources. In Europe you will frequently see areas where actions that could pollute ground water are prohibited, ranging from restrictions on what you are allowed to build and store to what is allowed to drive through the area. In the US this is more difficult to do.

There is the Clean Water Act. But that only really covers navigable waters, or a lesser degree all surface water. But it doesn't protect ground water. Then there is the Safe Drinking Water Act which sets standards for how safe the water out of the tap has to be. But how do you get safe water if it's difficult to protect your water source? Chlorine is the cheap and effective answer.

"Chlorine is the cheap and effective answer."

If you want water mostly free of bacteria. Not if you want drinking water.

Apart from that, I can only shake my head. Because doing on your land freely, what you want is very much supported by my ideals - but those freedom should stop, where it directly affects other people outside your borders. Polluting the groundwater is obviously doing that.

I've been all over the US and no where has it smelled or tasted remotely like chlorine. A quick Google says the high end is 4 ppm. If you think you can taste or smell that, you're lying to yourself.

In my area the smell of chlorine and chloramine is thick on some days (usually after storms and floods). I'm a reefkeeper, I see it in my water tests too, on those days I don't use my RO DI filter because I don't want the extra stuff going in. You can smell it under a hot tap as a sickly sweet smell.

> If you think you can taste or smell that, you're lying to yourself.

I most certainly can smell it.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK579463/

"Most individuals are able to taste or smell chlorine in drinking-water at concentrations well below 5 mg/l, and some at levels as low as 0.3 mg/l."

And you can taste/smell lots of things far below 4ppm - example: farts - so appealing to "this looks like a very small number so you must be lying to yourself" is nonsense here.

Indeed, that's the whole point of smell: detecting interesting or harmful things at low concentrations.

And smell and taste are intertwined senses, that together are highly attuned to detecting and avoiding toxins, and finding and enjoying nutritious substances.

For many people that live where there is no chlorine in the water, it's immediately obvious when there is added chlorine to the tap water. I'm not sure I can taste it, can't remember I've actually tried, but I can absolutely smell it.

I had coke that tasted like a swimming pool in Minnesota. I had no reason to suspect it would, so it's not something I was convincing myself of. It came from a machine that used tap water of course, rather than from a bottle or can.

In L.A. I can tell. I lived in Washington state for a couple of years and when I got back to L.A., I could clearly smell it. As for the taste, I don't know if it's chlorine I taste, but it does taste really different. I can also really tell the difference from most Bay area, specifically Hetch Hetchy water, and L.A. municipal.

If think people can't tell the difference, you're lying to yourself.

It is a matter of getting used to, childhood imprint.

Most Europeans will smell and taste the chlorine immediately, even in a coke in a fast food chain in the US where they mix that tap water in, or even just in ice cubes.

This conditioning works also the other way round. Read often that Americans usually find the tap water in Europe to be not "fresh", because of the missing chlorine.

I don't think there is any self-lying involved. People notice it the first time going and trying, certainly not because they have been subconsciously indoctrinated. Personally strongly confirm!

I suspect that the prominent “eww my food/drink smells like chlorine” problem isn’t the tap water. Most soft drink machines have filters that are quite effective at removing chlorine and chloramine.

Restaurants (at least in the US) are, IMO quite sensibly, required to sanitize dishes between uses. This can be done using chlorine or similar chemicals in a “low temperature dishwasher” or using heat in a “high temperature dishwasher”. The former leaves a disgusting residue that can take quite a while to degrade by itself. Those freshly washed, still wet plastic cups next to the drink machine, in a restaurant with a low-temp dishwasher, will make anything you put in them taste like chlorine or, worse, nitrogen chlorides. But they won’t give you nasty foodborne infections.

You can somewhat mitigate this by rinsing the cup before filling it.

(There is also some evidence that rinse aid, which intentionally leaves a residue on cups and dishes, is quite bad for you.)

Commercial rinse aid

Alcohol ethoxylates that were identified to cause epithelial inflammation and barrier damage[0] are listed as ingredients in consumer dish detergents[1] and rinse aids[2].

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36464527/#:~:text=The%20alco....

[1] https://smartlabel.pg.com/en-us/00037000982067.html

[2] https://giantfoodstores.com/product/finish-jet-dry-3-in-1-ri...

Your search and that of the other reply missed the previous sentence “The expression of genes involved in cell survival, epithelial barrier, cytokine signaling, and metabolism was altered by rinse aid in concentrations used in professional (emphasis mine) dishwashers.”

Here’s one of the studies:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009167492...

And here’s the ingredient list for a major brand of residential rinse aid:

https://www.rbnainfo.com/product.php?productLineId=654

It sure looks like the same stuff.

If you have low enough water hardness and TDS, then rinse aid serves no purpose and you can just not use it. Even with higher hardness, the main benefit is just aesthetic.

We add clear vinegar to the rinse aid container, but only when the particlar detergent (we don't always buy the same one) leaves residue. Seventh Generation (sadly bought out by Unilever) still makes decent detergent. However, what's the environmental impact at and around the factory? I'd rather wash fewer dishes by hand (I've measured, after our old dishwasher broke, and can wash a day's dishes with less than 1.7 gallons of water) than contribute to demand for a manufactured item with non-zero embodied energy and the boxes and boxes of detergent scaled to hundreds of millions, perhaps billions.

Just came back from europe. Couldn't tell any difference in the water, but found it interesting to see many of the hotels had free self serve filtered drinking water stations which gave me the impression something might be wrong with the tap water there

https://www.cokesolutions.com/content/dam/cokesolutions/us/d...

Chloramine, then, which is what Minneapolis uses, last I checked, and I could smell it relative to water that had boiled or sat out long enough. Our noses aren't as sensitive as a dog's, granted, but still a useful sense.

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