Water Water Everywhere... What’s Your Water?

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Bok
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Mon Jul 05, 2021 2:32 am

Baisao wrote:
Mon Jul 05, 2021 1:42 am
environmentally conservative.
Sadly, conservative these days mostly means environmentally destructive. Money and jobs are more important, even if the consequence is a destroyed planet where money or jobs won't matter any longer... sorry for the off-topic rant.
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wave_code
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Mon Jul 05, 2021 5:08 am

Aside from the obvious thing of that one would hope to see everyone having access to decent drinking water in the US and elsewhere which sadly and maddeningly seems highly unlikely... One alternative that is a good option here in Germany is that there are lots of local/regional water companies - I can get water from all over this region and further out at different levels of mineralization in glass bottles that come in heavy plastic crates - the bottles get washed/sterilized and re-used so they don't even need to go through the costly recycling process (the percentage of glass that actually gets recycled is equally infuriating) and nothing is shrink-wrapped. It does still mean there is lots of water being bottled and trucked around the country, a lot of it no better than the local tap, but some are and then the option is there with significantly lower impact than shipping water from further away, and if its a local company it means you aren't buying Nestle water.

Whether or not this still contributes to the problem that there seems to be this idea that tap water here is dirty or bad for you I don't know- you do still see tons of people buying cheap small shrink wrapped packages of bottled water at the store :roll: I'm lucky that the tap water here has been pretty decent, and overnight in the fridge with some binchotan makes it a bit softer and great for everyday use, enough that I haven't felt the need to go much further than that most of the time. I'm moving in a couple months though so I hope that will still be the case. Local water treatment here isn't without its issues either- the area where my in-laws live has incredibly hard water - nice for rehydrating after a long bike ride with some minerals but even with preventative measures it will destroy a dishwasher within a few years, so unless you want to de-scale your kettle every two days and have your tea or coffee taste awful you have to go to the local bottling plant and pick up water pretty regularly.
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Victoria
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Mon Jul 05, 2021 10:50 am

Ditto to what @Andrew S, @Baisao and @wave_code shared. While I dislike buying bottled water, I dislike bad tea more. Unfortunately, here is Annapolis on the Chesapeake Bay the water is very hard and tastes terrible with tea. I did try sourcing local spring water, but would need to subscribe to bi-monthly large shipments and I’m only here part of the year. The RO system in the house strips the water clean and so also tastes really bad with tea. Just this week, the Maryland Department of the Environment came by to test our ground water which is pumped from 150’ underground. Seems a neighbor 100’ below us has found gas additives in their ground water and they are trying to find the source. We are outside the town limits, so our ground water isn’t treated like city water is.

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wave_code
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Mon Jul 05, 2021 11:50 am

oof @Victoria, hope they don't find anything like that in your water. I'm from about an hour away just outside DC - the water there was clean, but tastes awful- I remember you could smell the treatment in the water and it tasted like a swimming pool. At least the system my family was on, I'm not sure if the water supply goes by county or what the divisions are there.
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LeoFox
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Mon Jul 05, 2021 11:53 am

wave_code wrote:
Mon Jul 05, 2021 11:50 am
oof Victoria, hope they don't find anything like that in your water. I'm from about an hour away just outside DC - the water there was clean, but tastes awful- I remember you could smell the treatment in the water and it tasted like a swimming pool. At least the system my family was on, I'm not sure if the water supply goes by county or what the divisions are there.
I'm probably 20 minutes away from you. Doesnt seem so bad from the brita filter. At least during warm months.

After the snows, tds suddenly spikes and moves above 400 = coffee time
Ethan Kurland
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Mon Jul 05, 2021 12:06 pm

Baisao wrote:
Mon Jul 05, 2021 1:42 am

A Brita filter is hit or miss. Black Berkey filters are marginally acceptable. RO and distilled are nasty.

Exxon alone had a carbon footprint of 528 million metric tons of carbon dioxide.
Brita filters cannot handle much. A filter for awful water might be effective for a week, not more.

I found that water filtered by the black Berkey filters mixed half & half with bottled water was fine for preparing tea. (an option, not recommendation) I returned to using the sterasyl ceramic filters with charcoal granules inside of them. I have bought Aquaserva brand that are the same size as the Berkey's were & are cheaper. (I don't mix this with bottled water.)

Washington Post recently tricked a lobbyist for Exxon into revealing Exxon's huge investment to deceive the world to believe it plans to be seriously involved in moving to alternatives to fossil fuels (Exxon has no serious plans for this) & to pressuring politicians to allow Exxon to continue to operate as it has. More people are reading what color bikini Kim Kardashian is wearing..... Sunny day in Boston. I will make some tea & enjoy. Cheers
Last edited by Ethan Kurland on Mon Jul 05, 2021 7:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.
faj
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Mon Jul 05, 2021 12:36 pm

Ethan Kurland wrote:
Mon Jul 05, 2021 12:06 pm
More people are reading what color bikini Kim Kardashian is wearing.....
I think you do not give people enough credit. You may be surprised how may people would search for and review the hard, visual evidence for that one, instead of just reading the headline.
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Baisao
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Mon Jul 05, 2021 12:59 pm

faj wrote:
Mon Jul 05, 2021 12:36 pm
Ethan Kurland wrote:
Mon Jul 05, 2021 12:06 pm
More people are reading what color bikini Kim Kardashian is wearing.....
I think you do not give people enough credit. You may be surprised how may people would search for and review the hard, visual evidence for that one, instead of just reading the headline.
If only to try and discredit it!
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LeoFox
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Mon Jul 05, 2021 3:19 pm

Here is an anecdote from a tea book:
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And here is some more interesting information:
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debunix
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Mon Jul 05, 2021 3:23 pm

Ethan Kurland wrote:
Tue Jun 01, 2021 5:07 pm
1 1/2 hours just to measure & add minerals to distilled water! That's more time than I will spend to cook even when I am having a guest come to dinner. Harmless fun = pleasure, right? Cheers
If you can find a mix you like, prepare it in bulk stock solution, store that, and dilute a little at a time before use....well, you're asking for those chemicals to be purified and shipped around the world....but might less fossil fuel than shipping the final water in small bottles.
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Bok
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Mon Jul 05, 2021 8:09 pm

LeoFox wrote:
Mon Jul 05, 2021 3:19 pm
Here is an anecdote from a tea book:
Image

And here is some more interesting information:

Image
Image
interesting quotes! I remember being shocked at how coke[!!!] tasted in the us, with chlorine ice cubes... we had to ask for it without ice after that, even with tons of sugar that taste came through prominently. Now I haven't had a coke in what feels like centuries and luckily no chlorine water either. Last time was on a business trip in China, with Longjing of all teas... yuk.
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Baisao
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Mon Jul 05, 2021 9:01 pm

@Bok, it’s on here somewhere but I’ll retell it briefly. I was teaching a class and asked for the carafe of hot water to be brought down a few degrees. They mixed a splash of tap with their filtered and remineralized hot water. The result was a punch in the nose from chlorine. I couldn’t smell anything past it and felt like I was driving blind through the class.

About three years ago we lost potable water to the entire city. IIRC the problem was caused by zebra mussels and too much pressure on the system caused by the surge of people who have moved here. The water smelled like fish food for two weeks. Even showering left us smelling like a meal for Shamoo.

Despite being one of the wealthiest nations in history, our infrastructure is like what one would expect in a developing nation. Whether owned by the government or privatized, our essential infrastructure is starved of needed capital. One is to keep taxes down and the other is to look good for shareholders.

Public water utilities have no motive to make great tasting water. It merely has to be potable and align with health regulations, which they often do not:

“For more than 20 years, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality under-reported the amount of radiation found in drinking water provided by communities all across Texas. As a result, health risks to people consuming the water have been underestimated in many water systems where radioactive contaminants are present.”
— KHOU


The rich and powerful don’t care.

If our power is lost because not enough was invested in preventing frozen pipes, they will jet off to Cancun.

If our water isn’t drinkable because of zebra mussels or radiation, they’ll just drink Volvic.

And if violence gets disturbingly bad, they’ll just move into gated communities with private security.

The rest of us can be happy freezing to death while drinking radioactive fish tank water and dodging bullets in our homes.
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Bok
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Mon Jul 05, 2021 9:05 pm

Baisao wrote:
Mon Jul 05, 2021 9:01 pm
dodging bullets in our homes.
Speaking of... it is also that people do go up in arms over the tiniest threat to their perceived right to bear dangerous firearms, but do not care enough for the water that keeps them alive.
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Baisao
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Mon Jul 05, 2021 10:37 pm

Bok wrote:
Mon Jul 05, 2021 9:05 pm
Baisao wrote:
Mon Jul 05, 2021 9:01 pm
dodging bullets in our homes.
Speaking of... it is also that people do go up in arms over the tiniest threat to their perceived right to bear dangerous firearms, but do not care enough for the water that keeps them alive.
Priorities
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pedant
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Tue Jul 06, 2021 11:42 am

Bok wrote:
Mon Jul 05, 2021 9:05 pm
Speaking of... it is also that people do go up in arms over the tiniest threat to their perceived right to bear dangerous firearms, but do not care enough for the water that keeps them alive.
entering political territory...
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