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help me make water taste good
Calica
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
My tap water has a bitter, chemical taste, I assume from dissolved minerals and chlorine. I use PUR faucet filters, which remove most of that; but the water still tastes slightly chemical with a bitter aftertaste, which is enough to discourage me from drinking it. I want to drink more water - I spend way too much time mildly dehydrated - and it would be much easier if water didn't taste terrible.
The two basic strategies are removing the bad-tasting elements from water and adding things to mask the bad tastes. So far I have not found either to be effective.
Things I've tried:
Bottled water is expensive and wasteful (and tastes like plastic anyway). So is reverse osmosis (uses much more water than it purifies). Water delivery services also feel indefensibly wasteful when I have safe, albeit unappealing, tap water (and there's the plastic jug issue). Filtered water from a grocery store dispenser also tastes like plastic.
For a while I thought maybe I just don't like water, period; but I have since experienced tap water that tasted like water is supposed to taste - in New Zealand. Where I do not live.
There are several natural springs within driving distance of me, but I have safety concerns about water straight out of the ground.
I sometimes buy glass-bottled or canned sparkling water and drink that straight or mixed with juice, but it has the same cost and environmental issues as regular bottled water.
I'm out of ideas. What do y'all do to make tap water not suck?
The two basic strategies are removing the bad-tasting elements from water and adding things to mask the bad tastes. So far I have not found either to be effective.
Things I've tried:
- Brita and ZeroWater filters: less effective than PUR at making water palatable.
- Charcoal sticks that go in your water bottle: did nothing.
- Using a Brita filter pitcher in addition to the faucet filter: made no difference, except that the water absorbed a plastic taste from the pitcher.
- Filling a glass carafe with water in the evening and storing it in the fridge for the next day: water tastes funky and flat.
- Infusing water with fruit: water smells a little like fruit, but all I get is a vaguely tart taste that's not any more pleasant than straight water.
- Flavor concentrates: water tastes like diluted sugar-free candy. Blech.
- Tea and other infusions: tea/tisane brewed with bad-tasting water also tastes bad.
Bottled water is expensive and wasteful (and tastes like plastic anyway). So is reverse osmosis (uses much more water than it purifies). Water delivery services also feel indefensibly wasteful when I have safe, albeit unappealing, tap water (and there's the plastic jug issue). Filtered water from a grocery store dispenser also tastes like plastic.
For a while I thought maybe I just don't like water, period; but I have since experienced tap water that tasted like water is supposed to taste - in New Zealand. Where I do not live.
There are several natural springs within driving distance of me, but I have safety concerns about water straight out of the ground.
I sometimes buy glass-bottled or canned sparkling water and drink that straight or mixed with juice, but it has the same cost and environmental issues as regular bottled water.
I'm out of ideas. What do y'all do to make tap water not suck?
Calica on
0
Posts
It sounds like you need something more powerful than passive filtration, so anything you get will likely need electricity and should have NSF-certified filtration. If you can't or won't install a reverse osmosis system, then there are countertop systems like this: https://www.aquasana.com/clean-water-machine/dispenser
I bought a similar model from Costco a few years ago, and don't have any major complaints other than some spillage when replacing filters, etc.
Is the water gross from all the taps in the house? The garden spigot? Faucets can corrode and start tasting funny.
Is it seasonal? When I lived In the south (Nashville) it was a yearly occurrence that there was some sort of algae bloom and the water would be disgusting for about a month. I want to say it always happened in later summer when warm rains became frequent just before fall.
I suggest trying the water at a local grocery store just to see if their filtration works. You can usually pay a deposit and get big jugs and refill them at a commercial style machine with a high quality filter.
Have you tried this process?
- Boiling a pot of water
- Let it cool enough that you can pour it between two pots or containers a few times (aerates it a bit)
- refrigerate it for 24hours
I see heating the water and drinking it, cooling the water and drinking it, but not all of these steps in this order. The Pouring/aerating should help reduce the flat taste.
I would note that I've read multiple articles about britas and faucet filters actually being breeding grounds for bacteria, which they aren't designed to filter out: https://www.michiganradio.org/post/study-bacteria-can-grow-faucet-water-filters. If your faucet filter is not helping, you might consider trying water from a different tap in your house and adding charcoal to that.
Water softeners will also change the flavor profile of tap water (it'll be saltier and more metallic tasting). Reverse osmosis will help with those.
The harder the water, the better it tastes generally.
This is a good point. Pure water actually doesn't taste like much of anything, even if you get something like reverse osmosis, if you still don't like the taste then you very well may need to add things afterwards to make it taste better.
The only reason I filter my water is that my building is 50 years old and I rent.
The faucet filter improves the water a lot; just not to the point where I want to drink it. And yeah, I wondered about the bacteria issue. There's no good way to clean the housing that I can see. I'll try @Iruka's steps and see what that does.
I think the taste I don't like is metallic, which would make a lot of sense. At least some of the pipes are copper.
A counter top 0.5 micron carbon block filter is going to filter out any chlorine, bacteria, viruses and most dissolved minerals. From my research it'll filter out anything larger than fluoride. I think fluoride ions are just a little too small for anything short of a multi-stage reverse osmosis system.
The problem with Pur and Brita filters is they use charcoal chips, not a solid carbon block so a lot of undesirables still get through. With the carbon block filters, water can't get around the filtering step so every drop of water that comes out gets filtered down to the specified size.
Something along these lines:
https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/company-us/all-3m-products/~/3M-Aqua-Pure-Under-Sink-Dedicated-Faucet-Water-Filtration-Systems/?N=5002385+8730931+3289735925+3294145474&preselect=8709409&rt=rud&DCSext.CDC=AC&DCSext.Business=Health Care Business Group&visitID=44393543717982652031825730985506489637
The systems are a little spendy (about 300 bones) and they require some plumbing knowledge but they work really well. Grainger generally has something from 3M or culliver.
Like Iruka said, find a grocery store with a water jug recycling system. We buy 3-4 gallons of purified water at ~70 cents a gallon each week and then return the plastic jugs, which are shipped back to the plant to be melted down and reused. As a renter you really shouldn't be messing around with your plumbing.
The unit I linked in my first post is functionally identical but doesn't use proprietary filters and just screws onto your existing faucet.
You can get a .2 micron filter for the system I linked, it just really cuts down on the water flow. It uses standard/generic carbon block filters.
Anyway, there are three grocery stores within as many blocks of where I live. I'll check that out first.
Otherwise it's not hard to do I guess? I would definitely go with jugs at the grocery store or a countertop filter as a renter though.
Both of these things are true, until there is a problem. At which point the liability issue is on you for the water damage as the renter for making unauthorized pluming alterations. It's not the complexity of the issue that is the concern here, but who pays for things if something anywhere in that system goes wrong and the landlord decides to blame your water filter as the cause.
I have yet to have a landlord not be a shithead about kitchen area water damage from their shitty plumbing though, so even that's a toss up.