what is your local municipal water like?

[boomchakabowwow]

my old house, we pulled water from the same source as San Fransico, and the water was fantastic.

my new house? bleech..it is treated with chlorine and i can kinda taste it. barely. i still use it for cooking, but i dont really pull water from the tap to drink.

hows yours? anyone from Flint Michigan?

 

[HumbleHomeCook]

Ours comes straight up from an underground rock aquafer and it's as hard as you'd think. Got a leek? Give it a couple weeks and the calcium and limestone will clog it.

 

[Delat]

Our water in AZ is quite hard. I think it was around 14 grains when I first moved to Phoenix 30 years ago, these days it’s up over 20 grain last I checked. Probably due to shrinking reservoir levels and aquifers and such. For reference, anything over 10 is considered very hard.

We have a water softener for the whole house and a reverse osmosis filter which I use for drinking and cooking water. The RO gives peace of mind as well in terms of contamination other than hardness.

 

[MarcelNL]

ours is fine, but prone to cause scale so I had a water softener installed. Neither Chlorine nor Fluorine is added around here (to my joy)

 

[NotAddictedYet]

Chicago tapwater is fine. You'd think it's kinda bad but when I travel, I've encountered worse. Twice a year when the season changes though (spring, fall), it smells really funky. Also, LEAD PIPES.

Best tap water I've had is on Oahu. It would taste straight up sweet when chilled, close to Fiji/Evian quality in my opinion.

 

[Whit3Nitro]

Scotland. I’d argue we have some or the best tap water in the world!

 

[Nemo]

Ours is pulled from a river. Chlorinated but not super heavily. We are on rain/tank water half of the time and I can notice the difference.

When I lived in Melbourne, it had the sweetest water. Pulled from a few reservoirs with protected catchments. Doesn't seem quite as good these days, but it's still pretty good. Definitely less chlorinated than our town water.

If the chlorine is too much, get a carbon filter for your drinking water.

 

[Lars]

For drinking it is great, but very hard. For coffee and cooking I installed a filter in the basement and ran an extra line up to the kitchen.

 

[Rangen]

AZ also. Water is hard -- in the low-mid 20s. Got a softener. At first it was set too high, which made the water slippery and makes soap take forever to rinse off, so I backed off to a target of maybe 8. I picked that because it was some dishwasher maker's "above this, you should soften the water" threshold...

It does not taste all that good -- iron maybe, so I added an RO filter for drinking -- and doing final rinses of wine glasses, so I don't have to dry them.

I make up jugs of water with magnesium and potassium salts added back in, for coffee and tea. It improves the flavor, and keeps the stripped-of-minerals RO water from attacking the boiler of my espresso machine.

 

[rickbern]

NYC. Great water system, one of the quiet engineering marvels of the world.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_water_supply_system
With all the care given, the city's water supply system is partially exempted from filtration requirements by both the federal and the state government, saving more than "$10 billion to build a massive filtration plant, and at least another $100 million annually on its operation".

 

[DitmasPork]

my old house, we pulled water from the same source as San Fransico, and the water was fantastic.

my new house? bleech..it is treated with chlorine and i can kinda taste it. barely. i still use it for cooking, but i dont really pull water from the tap to drink.

hows yours? anyone from Flint Michigan?

NYC water is lovely, as is most stuff in the city—typically order tap in restaurants, unless fancying something fizzy. Usually let the tap at home run for a minute before drinking. LA tap water sucked, water in San Francisco when I lived there was good, Hawaii’s water excellent—too busy drinking other things when in New Orleans—I recall Houston water tasting like low tide.

 

[SwampDonkey]

I deal with groundwater contamination for a living so I know too much to be comfortable with a lot of place's water but Tallahassee has some of the best tap water in the country. None of that sulfur nastiness like South FL or heavily chlorinated pool water like coastal towns. Super hard though since it's all limestone aquifer water, it's a constant battle with shower heads etc.

I use a Berkey filter which makes a world of difference with coffee/tea flavor. Strips the chlorinated stuff and a bunch of the minerals that have you buying bulk vinegar.

 

[Michi]

In the US, the best town water I've ever come across was in Ft Collins. In Germany, Munich wins hands down. In both places, it's spring water that is fed by snow melt.

 

[M1k3]

Los Angeles water is meh.... I've had much worse. The water is definitely not anything to write home about. At least I can say, it's not super hard water, just somewhat.