7 ms·

There's a remarkable spectrum of subtle differences in the way water tastes. Plastic bottles, metal pipes, using a straw, city tap water, spring water, well wat

• dahfizz 6y ago
  Sometimes it is not very subtle. As someone who grew up on well water, the chlorine taste of any city water is unbearable to me.
  • Guest42 6y ago
    Well water is fantastic. I can notice the difference city to city and have since switched to certain types of bottled water. Making ice cubes with bottled water makes drinks taste differently.
    • xxpor 6y ago
      As someone who grew up with well water, it tasted fine, but (at least for me based on local conditions), it was a huge pain in the ass. Low pressure, extremely hard to the point where soap is useless and we had to replace things regularly from scale build up, the UV filter thing we had to run in the basement, the worry that one day you could randomly lose the prime on the pump and they'd have to dig to get it back (which happened once), no fluoride so my teeth aren't the best. Give me that carbon filtered (removes the chlorine taste) city water any day :)
      • Vrondi 6y ago
        Installing a whole-house water softener completely cures this and is very cheap (at least in the USA).
        • xxpor 6y ago
          I've talked to my parents about it multiple times but they're worried about the sodium content.
          • zdragnar 6y ago
            Potassium chloride water softening salt is more expensive, but unless you use way more water than we do, I don't find it to be an unreasonable expense.
          • frob 6y ago
            I've been living in a place with a softener on a well for a while now. Many people have asked about salty water, but I don't find it to be an issue at all. I even prefer water from our softened tap over the unsoftened one. I don't notice rings or residue in my drinking glasses. I think a common misconception is that your water runs through the salt. In reality, the water runs through a filter and the salt water is used to periodically flush the accumulated metals out of the filter. This could lead to some residual salt, but it will get flushed away quickly. The other source of salty water is a busted valve. Replace it and the water will be fine again.
            • xxpor 6y ago
              It's not the taste, it's that they're worried about sodium in general (high blood pressure).
            • bluGill 6y ago
              The salt is used for ion exchange. You trade calcium for sodium. So while you don't drink salt, it does have sodium.
      • matmatmatmat 6y ago
        I'll second a reverse osmosis filter. We filter municipal water through one to get drinking water and, honestly, we're very happy with it. It's not as good as, you know, Swiss mountain water, but it's pretty close.
      • toast0 6y ago
        Local conditions and probably equipment will make a difference in pressure. My well kicks on around 35 psi and off around 65, if I'm remembering right. Of course, it failed in the past year, no digging required, but it did take the better part of a day to pull up the old one, and attach a new one and lower it down. Plus one day of troubleshooting and a day of waiting for the pump to arrive didn't make a fun few days.
      • jessaustin 6y ago
        ...the worry that one day you could randomly lose the prime on the pump and they'd have to dig to get it back (which happened once)... Where was this? Pumps are placed at the bottom of wells and avoid this problem entirely. It's physically impossible for a pump placed at the top to raise water more than 10m.
    • goda90 6y ago
      If you want to avoid the cost and trash of bottled water, try keeping a pitcher of water(or reusable water bottles filled from the tap) in your fridge. The chlorine is pretty volatile, and will evaporate off within a day(assuming the pitcher isn't air tight). Just have some rotating stock so you can always have water ready to drink or make ice cubes. Of course you could also go the filtration route, but that adds the upfront cost of the system, and continuous cost of filters and wasted water.
      • snovv_crash 6y ago
        It depends on the treatment method your city uses. Chlorine gas will evaporate out, but chloramine won't, and will also react with a lot of things downstream to make nasty tasting organics, for example if you use the water in brewing.
        • ecpottinger 6y ago
          That is why I have a rain fresh filter. Needs no power to run either. http://rainfresh.ca/product/steel-gravity-water-filter/ http://rainfresh.ca/product/steel-gravity-water-filter/
          • quickthrower2 6y ago
            Looks good for prepping as it takes stream water too.
        • Scoundreller 6y ago
          And can depend on where in a city you are. And sometimes the different treatment systems are still mained to eachother so shifting demand and supply can change which water you’re drinking from. Toronto has chlorine plants and ozone plants.
      • ajuc 6y ago
        This is common knowledge among people growing potted plants to use tap water that stood for a few days in open container.
    • GeorgeTirebiter 6y ago
      These variations are why I brew coffee with distilled water - gives very consistent joe. Have a distilling machine.
      • dahfizz 6y ago
        Do you have a recommendation for a countertop distilling machine? A back of the napkin calculation shows that it would be 50% cheaper for me to pay for the electricity and distill water myself than buy bottled water, but the idea had never occurred to me.
        • ecpottinger 6y ago
          While not as good as distilling can I suggest filtering like the rain fresh system uses. I have used them for decades because well water has too much minerals (bad tasting) in this part of Ontario.
  • Vrondi 6y ago
    Yeah, I grew up on spring water, and going away to college and city water was excruciating.
  • deleted 6y ago
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  • fudged71 6y ago
    The tap water where I live in Canada is fantastic. But when I'm served filtered water with tap water ice cubes I can tell the difference pretty easily.
  • samatman 6y ago
    It's not going to be any city water though. Seattle has fantastic city water. Most months of the year, Oakland water is very good (offer not valid for all combinations of reservoir and pipes, your mileage may vary). Also, if you got used to something like iron or calcium enrichment, you might just not like those vintages, even if they're "objectively" good.
  • ksaj 6y ago
    Oppositely, I've lived in Toronto for quite a long time, but my family all live in rural Ontario. A bunch of years ago my parents finally got over the fear factor and came to the city to visit. My dad commented specifically that he was impressed at the taste of our tap water, and thought it was an unexpected highlight of the trip. We grew up on well water. Although by this point they were living "in town" so it is possible that their water has more chlorine, etc, than Toronto's. When I visit them, their tap water tastes dull (but not bad) to me, so there is that.
• vmception 6y ago
  but it isn't a good sanitation or cleanliness detector. people disagree with any water that tastes different than what they are used to and assume its bad. that's pretty much all it comes down to.
  • jjk166 6y ago
    Hey, whatever you've been drinking hasn't killed you yet. Really, up until a few generations ago, people tended to stay put and a family might drink from the same set of water sources for centuries. The only reason water would ever taste different is if something bad had happened to it.
    • vmception 6y ago
      I can understand how it is rational, but its just not usually accurate any more
• jfengel 6y ago
  The remarkable thing here is that it's not a chemical detection, but a nuclear one. Chemically, H2O and D2O are identical. We knew that our taste buds (and smell receptors) are incredibly sensitive to small amounts of chemicals. It's somewhat unexpected that they could distinguish molecular weights. It may tie in to the Vibrational Theory of Smell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibration_theory_of_olfaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibration_theory_of_olfaction The standard theory of odor is that it's a lock-and-key process, like the immune system (and related to it). But there are some odd holes in that theory, like why sulfur compounds smell "alike", even though they're different keys fitting different locks (and we can't even exactly say what "alike" means). This one guy suggests that it acts like a spectroscope, sensing the way atoms vibrate within the molecule. It's a brilliant theory that explains a lot of stuff, except that it's completely insane and there's nothing even vaguely like a biological mechanism that would enable it to work. He tried testing it with molecules that substituted deuterium for hydrogen, which alters the spectroscopic signature -- but got mixed results. Smell and taste are only distantly related as mechanisms (taste is actually several very different mechanisms, and that's well-documented). This suggests that there's even more to it than that. Does this bring Luca Turin back? Dunno. He seems to have abandoned smell research entirely.
  • deleted 6y ago
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  • tomjakubowski 6y ago
    > Chemically, H2O and D2O are identical. Deuterium is so much heavier than regular hydrogen that the bond lengths in D2O are shortened by enough (~3%) to affect cell chemistry. Also significant differences in boiling points and other physical properties. http://www.chm.bris.ac.uk/motm/D2O/D2Oh.htm http://www.chm.bris.ac.uk/motm/D2O/D2Oh.htm
• deckar01 6y ago
  I conducted an experiment once to settle an argument about identifying vodka by smell and taste. The argument was since regulations require 95+% neutral spirits to be diluted with water, the smell and taste should be uniform. We used 3 store bought vodkas reportedly made from potato, corn, or grain and our own mixtures of 95% grain alcohol with various water sources to matching dilution. Participants were allowed to sample the solutions and told what they were, then given the solutions blind in a random order and asked to identify each solution. Our participant group was too small and controls too loose to make any significant conclusions, but our guess was that pH was not regulated and could be a discerning factor. One of the participants scoring a near perfect score settled the bet. Even the smokers scored higher than what we expected for purely random guesses.
  • autokad 6y ago
    I'm still having a hard time trying to understand why you where surprised they weren't uniform. You can add .0001% of something to a food and taste the difference depending on what you added. if someone making a sandwich puts mustard on a sandwich and uses that knife to cut my bread, I can taste the mustard even though they wiped the knife. the % of mustard on my sandwich has to be very, very small.
    • deckar01 6y ago
      That’s not a very good analogy. It’s more like the concentration of nitrogen in the atmosphere increasing 5% and you being able to smell it. Ethanol is a notoriously overwhelming flavor and the rest of vodka is intended to be flavorless.