6 ms·

You shouldn't be using water from the hot tap even just for drinking or cooking, let alone putting in a neti pot. Water from a hot water tank can contain high l

by shawnz 8y ago

You shouldn't be using water from the hot tap even just for drinking or cooking, let alone putting in a neti pot. Water from a hot water tank can contain high levels of dissolved contaminants since it sits in your plumbing system for extended periods at high temperatures.

scythe 8y ago
No cooking? Even, say, boiling potatoes? I always use filtered water if I'm planning to consume it, but I thought I could get away with the sink if I was throwing it out. That's news to me, I'll have to boil cold water from now on.
- harshreality 8y ago
  I wouldn't worry as much about boiled potatoes as I would something like soaking/cooking grains. It's a matter of your level of concern. I rinse dry goods and and vegetables with tap water, and steam with tap water, but I use expensive water for anything else. Mostly because I don't discard the water. Either the food absorbs all the water, or I accept a mushy, stewy, or soupy consistency. Steaming is better if you're going to use tap water and discard it. With the food out of the water there's less contamination as well as less nutrient loss. Filters are not perfect. Reverse osmosis or distillation is better (in theory). Anyone using a filter should pay attention to what it filters. Some filters don't even claim to filter lead. I think Brita and Pur still have multiple filter types that filter different things, and one type isn't a strict subset of the other.
  - deepsun 8y ago
    After some googling, I concluded that filters in good-tap-water neighborhoods do more harm than good -- they filter out nutrients that we do need from water.
    - taneq 8y ago
      What nutrients does tap water have in it? Fluoride?
      - CodeWriter23 8y ago
        Various minerals and electrolytes such as calcium, magnesium, potassium. I don’t count fluoride as a nutrient.
      - coldtea 8y ago
        All kinds of minerals and such. In fact totally clean water, without them, is harmful and poisonous: "Drinking absolutely pure water can kill you. All the water we normally drink – from taps, from bottles, from the garden hose – contains impurities which affect a property of water called tonicity. This is the ability of a solution to draw or repel water from ajacent solutions when separated by a membrane. Solutions that are hypertonic gain water, while hypotonic solutions lose water. Drinking water, which we usually think of as pure, really contains a whole mess of salts and sugars which make it slightly hypertonic. They also give water its taste. The cytoplasm in the cells of your body also have a tonicity. So, when they are exposed to hypertonic solutions, the cells themselves lose water and shrivel up. When they are in hypotonic solutions, they gain water, swelling up and bursting like a balloon. Absolutely pure water -with no impurities at all – is the most hypotonic solution. So, if you drink enough of it, your cells will start absorbing water. This disturbs the balance of electrolytes (electrically conductive ions) in your body. This is most seriously a problem in the brain, where water poisoning can lead to brain damage, coma and even death."
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
    - berlinstartup 8y ago
      Either you don't know what the word nutrient means, or you've been bamboozled--water does not/should not contain nutrients.
  - Marsymars 8y ago
    > I rinse dry goods and and vegetables with tap water, and steam with tap water, but I use expensive water for anything else. Mostly because I don't discard the water. Either the food absorbs all the water, or I accept a mushy, stewy, or soupy consistency. I use roughly the same rule of thumb, but I've never been confident about applying it to beans. I often rinse and soak dry beans in bulk. I portion them out and freeze them after cooking, and don't really want to be freezing bean mush. They do absorb a lot of water, but between the rinsing/soaking/cooking process, it's also a lot of expensive water to be pouring out.
- olyjohn 8y ago
  The lady in the article got the infection after using a water filter. This leaves 2 possibilities that I can see. 1. The filter didn't do it's job. I thought that a good filter would filter all organisms (or like 99.9%). I'm told by people that you can drink out of a swamp or mud puddle with a good filter. 2. The filter does work, but she didn't maintain her filter. Maybe the dirty filter actually was a nice place to cultivate the amoebas? I would be curious if an unchanged filter can actually increase your chance of infection. At best though, the dirty filter wasn't able to filter this organism.
  - scythe 8y ago
    >I'm told by people that you can drink out of a swamp or mud puddle with a good filter. "Good filter" is a relative term. Maybe you could do it if you "filtered" the water with a $10M reverse osmosis membrane? The filters I buy all say "do not use with unsafe water" or some similar phrase.
    - wtallis 8y ago
      Filters for camping/outdoor usage are less than $100 and most of them are explicitly sold as suitable for use with dirty water. You get a disclaimer that they'll be slower and need to be replaced more often when used on dirty/cloudy water, and sometimes they also advise a chemical or UV treatment be used post-filtering if there are concerns about viruses. Eg. https://www.katadyn.com/us/us/428-8019160-katadyn-gravity-camp-6l_usa https://www.katadyn.com/us/us/428-8019160-katadyn-gravity-ca...
      - mattkrause 8y ago
        There’s a big difference between those and, say, a Britta filter.
deepsun 8y ago
Huh? If tap water is contaminated (by, say, metals or salts from plumbing system pipes), then boiling won't decontaminate it either.
- undersuit 8y ago
  The hot water in your water tank may contain an excess of salt deposits, leeched metals, and rusts that you don't want to consume. Cold water has less solubility of most substances than hot water and it spends less time sitting in a hot container of those substances. Therefore, use the cold water to make hot water on your stove and regularly clean the kettle: https://www.reddit.com/r/ThingsCutInHalfPorn/comments/7uu0jz/cutaway_of_a_water_heater_from_a_home_with_hard/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ThingsCutInHalfPorn/comments/7uu0jz...
  - Hello71 8y ago
    > The hot water in your water tank may contain an excess of salt deposits This is clearly impossible due to conservation of mass, unless you're claiming that the water heater is so hot that it causes nuclear reactions in the water.
    - rightbyte 8y ago
      Convervation of mass? What do that has to do with it. Hot water tanks accumilate mineral sediment which might tear of as particles and follow the stream.
    - wutbrodo 8y ago
      ? I'm not quite a physicist, but I'm pretty sure this is wrong. The closed system under consideration here consists of both the solute (from the parts of the plumbing system the water has passed through) and the water. If hotter water dissolves more solute, then less solute remains in those parts. What part of this violates conservation of mass?
- prewett 8y ago
  I would have had your perspective except that a few months ago I came back from vacation to find that my hot water smelled like windex. The apartment complex flushed my hot water tank, a whole lot of black sludge came out, and my water has been fine since. I assume that not using the hot water for a few weeks caused everything to collect in a concentration high enough to notice, but it makes me cringe to think of how much low level of windex-smelling stuff I drank previously. (Fortunately my hot water takes a minute or two to arrive, so I probably didn’t consume that much just because I didn’t want to wait long enough.)
GhostVII 8y ago
Isn't that pretty dependent on where you live? If you are in a newer house I doubt it would be an issue, since you have a personal water heater that gets cycled through pretty regularly.
- fpoling 8y ago
  If the water heater uses copper pipes, the copper still gets into the water. And even with plastic pipes the trace amount of plastic may still end in the water and nobody knows if drinking such water for, say, 40 years is safe. So do not use hot water for cooking/drinking.
  - sjg007 8y ago
    Pex is thermo stable.
  - amelius 8y ago
    You can buy food supplements containing copper explicitly, so I wonder how bad that could be.
    - hnnh44 8y ago
      Copper containers are actually great at killing bacteria. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3312355/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3312355/ But high levels can cause health problems, including kidney damage and possibly cancer. https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/programs/consultation-copper-drinking-water/document.html#2.1 https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/programs/consultation... Between dying of dysentery and risking long term health issues it's a simple choice. But unless your doctor specifically tells you to add more copper, you shouldn't be going out of your way to get it.
kachurovskiy 8y ago
Yup. In houses that are not connected to the central heating, hot water travels through many more systems in your house than the cold water. Some of those systems can be pretty nasty e.g. when I disassembled my circulation pump, the water-immersed rotor assembly was leaking black goo.

by shawnz 8y ago

scythe 8y ago

No cooking? Even, say, boiling potatoes? I always use filtered water if I'm planning to consume it, but I thought I could get away with the sink if I was throwing it out. That's news to me, I'll have to boil cold water from now on.

harshreality 8y ago
I wouldn't worry as much about boiled potatoes as I would something like soaking/cooking grains. It's a matter of your level of concern. I rinse dry goods and and vegetables with tap water, and steam with tap water, but I use expensive water for anything else. Mostly because I don't discard the water. Either the food absorbs all the water, or I accept a mushy, stewy, or soupy consistency. Steaming is better if you're going to use tap water and discard it. With the food out of the water there's less contamination as well as less nutrient loss. Filters are not perfect. Reverse osmosis or distillation is better (in theory). Anyone using a filter should pay attention to what it filters. Some filters don't even claim to filter lead. I think Brita and Pur still have multiple filter types that filter different things, and one type isn't a strict subset of the other.
- deepsun 8y ago
  After some googling, I concluded that filters in good-tap-water neighborhoods do more harm than good -- they filter out nutrients that we do need from water.
  - taneq 8y ago
    What nutrients does tap water have in it? Fluoride?
    - CodeWriter23 8y ago
      Various minerals and electrolytes such as calcium, magnesium, potassium. I don’t count fluoride as a nutrient.
    - coldtea 8y ago
      All kinds of minerals and such. In fact totally clean water, without them, is harmful and poisonous: "Drinking absolutely pure water can kill you. All the water we normally drink – from taps, from bottles, from the garden hose – contains impurities which affect a property of water called tonicity. This is the ability of a solution to draw or repel water from ajacent solutions when separated by a membrane. Solutions that are hypertonic gain water, while hypotonic solutions lose water. Drinking water, which we usually think of as pure, really contains a whole mess of salts and sugars which make it slightly hypertonic. They also give water its taste. The cytoplasm in the cells of your body also have a tonicity. So, when they are exposed to hypertonic solutions, the cells themselves lose water and shrivel up. When they are in hypotonic solutions, they gain water, swelling up and bursting like a balloon. Absolutely pure water -with no impurities at all – is the most hypotonic solution. So, if you drink enough of it, your cells will start absorbing water. This disturbs the balance of electrolytes (electrically conductive ions) in your body. This is most seriously a problem in the brain, where water poisoning can lead to brain damage, coma and even death."
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
  - berlinstartup 8y ago
    Either you don't know what the word nutrient means, or you've been bamboozled--water does not/should not contain nutrients.
- Marsymars 8y ago
  > I rinse dry goods and and vegetables with tap water, and steam with tap water, but I use expensive water for anything else. Mostly because I don't discard the water. Either the food absorbs all the water, or I accept a mushy, stewy, or soupy consistency. I use roughly the same rule of thumb, but I've never been confident about applying it to beans. I often rinse and soak dry beans in bulk. I portion them out and freeze them after cooking, and don't really want to be freezing bean mush. They do absorb a lot of water, but between the rinsing/soaking/cooking process, it's also a lot of expensive water to be pouring out.
olyjohn 8y ago
The lady in the article got the infection after using a water filter. This leaves 2 possibilities that I can see. 1. The filter didn't do it's job. I thought that a good filter would filter all organisms (or like 99.9%). I'm told by people that you can drink out of a swamp or mud puddle with a good filter. 2. The filter does work, but she didn't maintain her filter. Maybe the dirty filter actually was a nice place to cultivate the amoebas? I would be curious if an unchanged filter can actually increase your chance of infection. At best though, the dirty filter wasn't able to filter this organism.
- scythe 8y ago
  >I'm told by people that you can drink out of a swamp or mud puddle with a good filter. "Good filter" is a relative term. Maybe you could do it if you "filtered" the water with a $10M reverse osmosis membrane? The filters I buy all say "do not use with unsafe water" or some similar phrase.
  - wtallis 8y ago
    Filters for camping/outdoor usage are less than $100 and most of them are explicitly sold as suitable for use with dirty water. You get a disclaimer that they'll be slower and need to be replaced more often when used on dirty/cloudy water, and sometimes they also advise a chemical or UV treatment be used post-filtering if there are concerns about viruses. Eg. https://www.katadyn.com/us/us/428-8019160-katadyn-gravity-camp-6l_usa https://www.katadyn.com/us/us/428-8019160-katadyn-gravity-ca...
    - mattkrause 8y ago
      There’s a big difference between those and, say, a Britta filter.

deepsun 8y ago

Huh? If tap water is contaminated (by, say, metals or salts from plumbing system pipes), then boiling won't decontaminate it either.

undersuit 8y ago
The hot water in your water tank may contain an excess of salt deposits, leeched metals, and rusts that you don't want to consume. Cold water has less solubility of most substances than hot water and it spends less time sitting in a hot container of those substances. Therefore, use the cold water to make hot water on your stove and regularly clean the kettle: https://www.reddit.com/r/ThingsCutInHalfPorn/comments/7uu0jz/cutaway_of_a_water_heater_from_a_home_with_hard/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ThingsCutInHalfPorn/comments/7uu0jz...
- Hello71 8y ago
  > The hot water in your water tank may contain an excess of salt deposits This is clearly impossible due to conservation of mass, unless you're claiming that the water heater is so hot that it causes nuclear reactions in the water.
  - rightbyte 8y ago
    Convervation of mass? What do that has to do with it. Hot water tanks accumilate mineral sediment which might tear of as particles and follow the stream.
  - wutbrodo 8y ago
    ? I'm not quite a physicist, but I'm pretty sure this is wrong. The closed system under consideration here consists of both the solute (from the parts of the plumbing system the water has passed through) and the water. If hotter water dissolves more solute, then less solute remains in those parts. What part of this violates conservation of mass?
prewett 8y ago
I would have had your perspective except that a few months ago I came back from vacation to find that my hot water smelled like windex. The apartment complex flushed my hot water tank, a whole lot of black sludge came out, and my water has been fine since. I assume that not using the hot water for a few weeks caused everything to collect in a concentration high enough to notice, but it makes me cringe to think of how much low level of windex-smelling stuff I drank previously. (Fortunately my hot water takes a minute or two to arrive, so I probably didn’t consume that much just because I didn’t want to wait long enough.)

GhostVII 8y ago

Isn't that pretty dependent on where you live? If you are in a newer house I doubt it would be an issue, since you have a personal water heater that gets cycled through pretty regularly.

fpoling 8y ago
If the water heater uses copper pipes, the copper still gets into the water. And even with plastic pipes the trace amount of plastic may still end in the water and nobody knows if drinking such water for, say, 40 years is safe. So do not use hot water for cooking/drinking.
- sjg007 8y ago
  Pex is thermo stable.
- amelius 8y ago
  You can buy food supplements containing copper explicitly, so I wonder how bad that could be.
  - hnnh44 8y ago
    Copper containers are actually great at killing bacteria. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3312355/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3312355/ But high levels can cause health problems, including kidney damage and possibly cancer. https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/programs/consultation-copper-drinking-water/document.html#2.1 https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/programs/consultation... Between dying of dysentery and risking long term health issues it's a simple choice. But unless your doctor specifically tells you to add more copper, you shouldn't be going out of your way to get it.

kachurovskiy 8y ago

Yup. In houses that are not connected to the central heating, hot water travels through many more systems in your house than the cold water. Some of those systems can be pretty nasty e.g. when I disassembled my circulation pump, the water-immersed rotor assembly was leaking black goo.