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Comment by cypherpunks01 | Hacker News Reader

A surprising amount of Americans refuse to drink tap water entirely, in their own suburban homes with quality municipal water, or anywhere else they travel, holding the opinion that plastic bottled water is safer and better. Of course bottled water is regulated far less than tap water, and contains an ungodly amount of microplastics from manufacturing and storage.

Under-sink RO systems seem pretty great to me, anywhere you live. With a small holding tank, municipal water pressure is enough to drive small RO cartridges, requiring no electrical power to run, and giving more than sufficient flow rate for all drinking water. I think the biggest downside is a few hundred dollars in initial setup, and cartridges every year or two. This seems safer than relying on the changing opinions of experts as to what amount of harmful chemicals are safe to drink.

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> A surprising amount of Americans refuse to drink tap water entirely, in their own suburban homes with quality municipal water

It shouldn't be surprising that Americans might understand that their water might not actually be safe despite the municipal government saying it is. It took two whole years for administrators in Flint, Michigan to acknowledge their lead pipe crisis. Trust needs to be earned and maintained, and America is notoriously bad at maintaining critical public infrastructure.

> America is notoriously bad at maintaining critical public infrastructure.

How does that compare with food safety in commercial products? That's the question.

I mean, most bottled waters are transparent, so that compares well against what Flint had

Even if safe, municipal water where I live (San Jose, California) contains a ton of chlorine and is super hard, making it unpleasant to drink. In contrast, bottled water consistently tastes fine.

San Jose water is absolute trash. There may not be (much) lead, but there are a host of other minerals and contaminants. It’s also a roll of the dice whether you’ll find Legionnaires' disease in your pipes.

I have a whole-house soft-water filter for general use, and for drinking/cooking get 5-gallon bottles filled with RO purified water from The Water Spring on Homestead in Santa Clara. The municipal source for RO water matters, and Santa Clara has the best utilities in the valley.

http://waterspring.com/

Stay safe out there.

https://www.eldoradosprings.com/out-of-state-shipping-of-eld...

Cheers

Hard to beat $0.25/gal at Water Spring.

Dunno. Have been unaware of them so far. Am not that often in SJ anyway, but when I am the tap is taboo for me. That stuff can only be spat out.

I know the Eldorado Springs from when I'm in Aspen, Austin, Altadena, and while I don't get the hype surrounding the stuff, it's more than acceptable (for water).

Taste matters. Be it for coffee, tea, cooking, making desserts, even baking, or making your own pizza dough.

sorry if this is a stupid question because we don't have chlorinated water in Germany, but do people brew green tea or good coffee with tap water? Doesn't it taste god awful? One of the things which I remember from my holidays in Spain as a kid, which is one of the few countries which adds it here, is that the water tasted like pool water.

If you drink it all the time you are used to the taste. At least that's how it is for me

> but do people brew green tea or good coffee with tap water?

I use filtered tap water (under-sink type) which removes most of it.

A lot of the higher end coffee makers like Keurig have built-in filter cartridges in the water tank.

Most commercial coffee maker setups I've seen (hard-plumbed) in offices have a filter attached to the plumbing behind the appliance.

Water can be safe/potable and taste terrible, and vice versa.

Water is chlorinated in Germany [1]. There may be less as ozone may be used as primary disinfectant.

[1] https://www.lenntech.com/processes/disinfection/regulation-e...

At imperceptible levels.

Compared to that, in New York, I can definitely taste it and it took some getting used to. (Ironically, at this point my senses seem to have been rewired to associate the taste of chlorine with fresh, i.e. non-stale tap water.)

Depends on where in .de it is sourced. "Uferfiltrat" meaning from deep wells next to, or near a river, deep wells reaching into other groundwater sources, and dammed reservoirs.

Uferfiltrat=shitty, deep well=depends, dammed reservoirs=mostly good/usually soft water.

Can even vary within larger cities, where different parts get water from different sources.

Its extremely unlikely that German water isn't chlorinated. Perhaps you are thinking about fluorinated?

Chlorine in water is actually fine and tasteless at the concentrations it reaches at the taps - it's basically extremely diluted stomach acid.

The problem is chloramines caused by chlorinated organics. These give water the swimming pool smell and are bad for you.

The solution is easy - reduce the organics in the water before chlorination, and oxygenate (aerate) the water before delivery. But systems can get overwhelmed by too much rain and runoff.

Chlorination of drinking water is indeed uncommon in Germany.

If it’s done, the level is often imperceptible, contrary to the US (I actually had to look this up – I’ve never tasted it in German drinking water in various cities myself).

How do they sterilize it?

Hydrogen peroxide and ozone.

> Chlorine in water is actually fine and tasteless at the concentrations it reaches at the taps - it's basically extremely diluted stomach acid.

No. The chlorine in tap water is HOCl + OCl- (it’s a weak acid/base equilibrium). Stomach acid is HCl. And chlorine has both a noticeable smell and odor even at low concentrations (e.g. 1ppm in water). The smell is much worse if any of the chlorine has reacted with organic crud to turn into NCl3.

More enlightened cities in the US use monochloramine (NH2Cl), which is a rather weak disinfectant but is barely noticeable at normal concentrations.

My general experience in Australia when i talk about drinking RO water is that im looked at like a crazed madman who drinks "holy water"... So atleast hear i daresay its safe to say the average persons taste and smell must be piss poor

You can get inured to just about anything with enough exposure, barring exceptional circumstances where you have difficulty learning to ignore things.

Visiting friends recently, they have well water which smells like sulfur from their tap. Visiting them for a few days, I do not get inured to it, but my friend cannot tell it's there.

Yes, water quality matters a lot in coffee enthusiast land. They actually make little mineral packets that you add to a gallon of distilled water to get a "perfect" brewing water - I know since I actually use them for my espresso machine to fight scale buildup from my +10 grain tap water.

Note this excessiveness is really needed for espresso though; a regular Brita jug handles more tolerant methods of brewing perfectly well (and to be honest most people murder coffee enough that the water is the least of their concerns)

Do you have a brand name or amazon link for the mineral packets ?

I use "Third Wave Water" but there are other brands out there

Just a suggestion as well, theres countless 'water recipes' that let you easily do the same thing for a fraction the price. They arent doing anything complicated. Some mixes are simple two ingredients, some go up to several, but all are pretty dead simple.

Lets you fiddle and fine tune things more for your own preferences too.

Third Wave Water is a well known one.

There is a whole book on the topic (2015, with a new edition supposedly coming soon):

https://collectedcoffee.com/products/water-for-coffee

Chlorine solubility in water decreases rather quickly with raising temperature. This fact causes me to believe that if one doesn't like his hot-brewed tea made with tap water it's not because of chlorine exactly. I'd suspect calcium or iron instead.

One side effect of RO is vitamin B12 deficiency. And there is some debate around whether that is true or not, but anecdotally, I had developed a severe B12 deficiency to the point that one day out of the blue, I couldn’t move one of my legs. I freaked out and went to the ER, and it turns out, 1 B12 shot later, I went back to normal within minutes. The doctor hypothesized that I had developed a severe B12 deficiency because of RO water and that I supplement my food with B12 supplements. The regular intake of meat/eggs wasn’t sufficient to compensate for the lack of B12 absorption.

What's the mechanism here? Because it's not like there is B12 supplements in the water.

reverse osmosis removes minerals like cobalt, which are used for b12 production

if you only drink ro water it can creep up on you, but takes some time

It's not used for b12 production in human metabolism. It is, after all, a vitamin. Is this about cobalt deficiency in dairy and meat animals?

How much Co is in your water compared to your food. EPA says just 2 ppb in tap water. This means if you drink about 40 fl.oz. per day you only get 2ug of Co from your water. Per the EPA you get about 2-20x more from your food. Pretty much in no cases is your water a source of nutrients.

refs:

https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2016-09/documents/co...

https://www.cdc.gov/nutrition/php/data-research/fast-facts-w...

This is my understanding too. There are microscopic amounts of trace elements here or there but in reality none of them add up to anything meaningful compared to what you get from food, multivitamins, or other less ideal means.

Rather if they did there'd be probably quite a lot of concern.

Not sure where that old wive's tale came from but even my parents had similar concerns against filtered water ages ago.

I've heard doctors repeat it too, though more as an overall mineral deficiency from already poor diets (which is the bigger issue)

We humans cannot synthesize cobalamins from inorganic cobalt.

I drank only distilled water for 16 years. No supplements all that time, just regular food. No B12 deficiency or any other health issues.

But did you pair it with pure grain alcohol as directed for maximal protection of your precious vital fluids?

The reason I drank it is I like the taste. I am now using an RO filter, and the taste is not as good.

Similar risks regarding removal of sulfate from public water supply, or via filtration.[1] Who knew! Some of us were relying on actual nutrients from the water all along. Pristine water was, and is, a challenge for this cohort.

[1] https://biomedres.us/fulltexts/BJSTR.MS.ID.006372.php

In the linked article, rybett@aol.com uses the CORREL function in an openoffice spreadsheet to determine a weak correlation between autism diagnoses and sulfur content in tap water in a few regions of New Jersey.

His other publications include a self-published amazon book titled Autism, Enzymes and the Brimstone Demons. [1]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Autism-Enzymes-Brimstone-Demons-Trill...

So does that mean you are persuaded or that the author doesn't have the right pedigree for you to listen? Because when you set aside the author's idiosyncrasies, there is indeed something remarkable.

Drinking sulfate won't repair broken sulfur metabolism, but it's completely plausible that a subset of people maintained adequate day-to-day function with the benefit of sulfate-laden water, and now fall below the threshold with sulfate mostly removed.

Interesting.

I'm on a well, but with super hard water. So I have a water cooler, which I empty into a Brita pitcher, but just for drinking.

Just for the flavour.

I cook with my hard water though. Lots of stews and soups too, make bread, etc. So I suspect I get sufficiently mineralised as a result.

For context, I was boiling a large pot of water and got distracted by a call. Most of the water boiled away, well over a gallon. I was left with a solid white disk of calcium at the bottom. Also, when I broke it to get it out, it was super sharp, almost cut myself.

The only papers I could find in Google Scholar about this connection all come from India, and does not seem strongly connected. The study at https://journals.lww.com/jfmpc/fulltext/2025/04000/prevalenc... , for example, says:

> While some studies have hypothesized that the use of RO water could contribute to vitamin B12 deficiency, no significant differences were observed in this study.[20] Symptoms of deficiency were not significantly associated with serum vitamin deficiency status. Only VDD was significantly associated with fatigue as a symptom. This discrepancy raises questions about the current normative values for vitamin B12 and vitamin D3 in the Indian population and suggests the need for further research.

A whole lot of people drink RO water. If it were a simple correlation, I would expect to see cases and papers from all across the world.

I also know there's a long history of false claims along the lines "distilled water sucks the minerals from your body", also called "hungry water". I first heard in the 1980s as a supposed reason for not using distilled water in a radiator. Or even commentary of it in the Carnivorous Plant FAQ at https://www.sarracenia.com/faq/faq3385.html .

Because of that long history, and the lack of a good mechanism for how it should work, I need a much higher level of evidence for a direct, causal connection.

If water is giving you any nutrient in a significant manner, change your diet.

Some essential micronutrients such as arsenic are primarily sourced from water. You don’t need much so most natural sources contain enough. There is actually a valid concern that obsessive over-purification of drinking water can lead to deficiencies of some trace minerals.

Wow this has gone off the rails quickly.

To wit: Arsenic is not an essential micronutrient.

"Trace quantities of arsenic have been proposed to be an essential dietary element in rats, hamsters, goats, and chickens. Research has not been conducted to determine whether small amounts of arsenic may play a role in human metabolism." [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenic

There is substantial evidence that arsenic is a required micronutrient in all mammalian biology. This is not even controversial, you can reliably induce deficiency syndromes in a broad spectrum of animal models, and the operative pathways exist in humans. The effect was first observed in animal husbandry in parts of the world with very low background arsenic levels.

It has the same toxicity and micronutrient profile as selenium, another extremely toxic but nonetheless essential micronutrient. Unfortunately, activists with an unrelated agenda have been spreading unscientific misinformation about arsenic to advance that agenda.

Same story as fluoride outrage actually. Being anti-science is fashionable and most people are ignorant about chemistry.

It is one thing that makes me glad I am no longer a practicing chemist.

If what you are saying is true – and I am not being sarcastic - I encourage you to edit and update the Wikipedia page that I referenced.

The authority that I have appealed to (Wikipedia) is a reasonable one and bias should not be implied in the absence of these supposed corrections you have to make.

I’m open-minded …

A tertiary source aims to be non-authoritative. Wikipedia tries pretty hard at it.

Eat a serving of rice, preferably American, without rinsing it.

Enjoy your 10000% recommended daily intake of Arsenic.

Background levels are much higher than current standards with no observable effects in many parts of the world. This is well-studied. There is a threshold but it is higher than people assume.

Plant-based arsenic often has poor bioavailability. Quite a few plants people eat are natural accumulators but it just passes through. Pesticides and geology are the primary bioavailable sources.

My RO system has a remineralisation cartridge. You def dont want to drink ph neutral water, it feels hard, and doesnt taste sweet.

The water in some parts of the US has natural chemistry that makes it unpleasant to drink even though it is safe. California urban areas are notorious for this, as an example. In principle you could remediate the water to make it taste good and remove any discoloration (also a thing in a few regions) with enough industrial processing but that would greatly increase the cost of already expensive tap water.

People who grew up in one of these areas are habituated into never drinking the tap water even if they move to a city with excellent tasting and very high quality tap water. I’ve lived in extreme examples of both.

You also see the opposite case, where someone who grew up with amazing tap water naively grabs a glass from the tap in north San Diego and has a “wtf is this” moment.

San Diego's tap water tastes truly awful. The first time I ever traveled to another city (Denver), I was forced to drink the tap water and could not believe how good it tasted.

San Diego has the worst tap water for drinking I have ever experienced in the US. When I lived there, pretty much everyone had a reverse osmosis system installed to make it drinkable.

Fortunately, I live in the Pacific Northwest currently, which generally has some of the best tasting water you’ll find anywhere. No one would dream of not drinking the tap water.

In your second paragraph you seem to be describing carbon-block filtration. Particularly, the maintenance of an RO system consists of a lot more than just replacing cartridges every year or two.

Could you elaborate? I have an undersink RO filter. Maintenance consists of changing filters every year or two.

you need sterilize entire system periodically. and completely empty/refill tank once in a while

I totally believe that the system you have requires this, but plenty of others do not.

Here's the maintenance manual for the one I have. The sterilization and emptying/refilling are done as part of the filter replacement, and not otherwise:

https://www.whirlpoolwatersolutions.com/wp-content/manuals/W...

" Maintenance consists of changing filters every year or two." it's not same as "disconnecting lines and pouring bleach inside when i change filter" or using "Manufacturer recommends using the Model 7301203 Sanitizing Kit"

You need to change filters as recommended, change o-rings, and bleach the fittings. Algae will develop on those. Thats pretty much it.

I wouldnt run bleach through the filters. The filter medium saturates, and any further use will just recontaminate water

> ... bottled water ... contains an ungodly amount of microplastics from manufacturing and storage.

Is it worse than the other groceries we can't readily get without them being wrapped in plastic? Or storing leftovers in plastic bags at home?

My guess is yes, because they can more easily get into the liquid. Unless you are talking about other liquids like juices or canned foods, those I would expect are similar or vary depending on the type of plastic.

A surprising amount of Americans live in cities that cheaped out on the water infrastructure and found out their water had lead.

Like me.

Luckily, I am very unreasonably distrusting of government and never drank the stuff.

Didn’t the Trump EPA roll back water quality rules for forever chemicals? Chemicals that accumulate over time and are known to cause organ failure?

If the federal rules allow unsafe levels of PFAs it’s reasonable to expect that municipal water companies adhere to said unsafe limits. So no we probably should not trust our municipal water supplies.

Maybe in countries that have functional governments that’s a safe bet.

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