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Comment by secabeen | Hacker News Reader

I grew up in LA, where water is scarce, and valued. Water fountains are around, but they have valves, which break, stick, or otherwise cause problems. When I lived in Chicago, I was shocked to see that their water fountains have no valves: They run full flow 24x7. Given the weather (frozen pipes) and the water resources available to Chicago (Lake Michigan), it makes sense for them to do it this way, but I had a lot of dissonance when I first saw it.

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Ditto rome. It just comes out of the wall in places.

Hail, pope.

And (last time I've been) it was excellent water. Strange seeing other tourists paying for the expensive mineral water next to a running tap. (they probably didn't know that the water is fine or didn't care).

To be fair, a bottle of water you can carry with you is pretty convenient. You can keep refilling it from the fountains, too.

So, buy a reusable water bottle. People buying plastic disposable bottles with water were not doing something "fair" or consciously getting them for the bottle.

When I was a tourist in Rome I didn't know what they were for at first. After some research I became an enthusiastic Nasoni user. I really like the trick where you plug the end and the water comes out of a hole on top of the spout like a drinking fountain.

had a good guidebook with me when I was in Rome. It said that the water is excellent and showed the trick with the hole - so I knew it and used it.

Mostly I filled a pretty small bottle with water and carried that around. Didn't had to carry much, because I could refill it on nearly every corner.

Having visited Rome in July/August, those fountains were life savers!

I've never heard of such a thing. That would be so strange to see.

Portland, Oregon has them all over:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benson_Bubbler

Indeed! I haven't seen a "normal" drinking fountain in Portland in ages.

That said, I have seen homeless people do unspeakable things with them, so my trust is rattled.

"hobo bidets" we call them

I often see crows drinking out of them, which I find endearing, but others might look askance at.

I'd be worried if the crows refused to drink from them.

The constant flowing water and exposure to the elements provides a lot of mechanical action to wash away bacteria. I've also never actually seen anything gross stuck onto the water spout, so I'm not too worried about it.

There's chloramines in the water to deal with things like that anyway. Nobody is scrubbing out the water mains beneath the streets - they're not 'clean' by any common definition of the word, but they are perfectly acceptable - they're sanitary due to the disinfection compounds in the water.

I've seen them used as birdbaths, and people let their dogs drink from them. It doesn't make me terribly excited about drinking from them myself.

100k gallons of potable water per day.

yup. water that is passing through the pipes is simply moving from the mountains to the ocean (and producing electricity [1]). whether they go through the bubblers or route around via the rivers is less consequence.

[1] http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/drinking-water-pipes-can-also...

It's misleading to equate treated water with untreated water.

In Paris we have these too, the famous Wallace Fountains, and most of them just run all the time.

Other kinds of fountains have valves though, like the ones which provide sparkling water. And I can guarantee people are using them, in the evening there's frequently a line of people waiting to fill their bottles.

There's something very French about having water fountains which give sparkling water.

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