This question is obviously intended for those that live in places where tap water is “safe to drink.”
I live in Southern California, where I’m at the end of a long chain of cities. Occasionally, the tap smells of sulfur, hardness changes, or it tastes… odd. I’m curious about the perspective of people that are directly involved and their reasoning.
I’m going to do my best to explain this.
When a pool is tested to see if chlorine needs to be added (if there are impurities) they will typically add free chlorine. The free chlorine will combine with the impurities. The odor that you smell when you go to a pool is the free chlorine evaporating out. but some of the chlorine will stay in the pool as combined chlorine. it combined with the impurities.
After a while there isn’t enough chlorine in the pool and the impurities build back up.
Repeat the process.
The real problem is when you get to much combined chlorine in a pool. The health authorities will tell you to either fix it or close it.
How do you get rid of combined chlorine? You add free chlorine with will break the combined chlorine.
The combined chlorine can cause health issues. (that is why the health authorities will tell you to fix it). usually a good pool maintainer will detect the issue and just fix it before a notice is handed over.
Now our city puts chlorine into the drinking water to get rid of impurities (in laymans terms : the bad things in the water you don’t want to drink). We used to put free chlorine into the drinking water.
The nice thing was they would add the free chlorine it would get rid of the impurities and most of the free chlorine would just go away. (evaporate) .
the down side? we kept having to add more and more (that was expensive.
some genius decided to switch from free chlorine to combined chlorine for the drinking water. combined DOESN’T go away by itself. you have to break combined chlorine.
the benefit was it cost a LOT less doing it this way.
the downside is you shouldn’t be drinking combined chlorine. Think about it. if there is to much combined chlorine in the pool and it’s listed as unsafe to swim in , then why would be it safe to drink it? to fix food in it? to bath in it ? to take a shower in it? it’s illogical.
yet that is exactly what the city did.
i hope that i got that explained correctly.
prolonged exposure to combined chlorine can lead to asthma, allergies and other health issues
Sure, that all makes sense, but it’s still anecdotal.
I’m not a chemist, but “combined chlorine” from what I read is also known as “Chloramine”. Going from there, I went to both Minneapolis and St Paul’s water supply. I couldn’t fine chloramine levels for St Paul but Minneapolis does have it, and it’s listed at 3.9ppm.
Minneapolis Jan 2024 Report
Now, knowing that, I went to the EPA to figure out what a safe level was, and turns out they have an entire page about this mostly due to fear mongering and misinformation. In fact they have a blurb describing exactly what you’re talking about:
From the EPA’s basic information site, The drinking water standard for chloramines is 4 parts per million (ppm) measured as an annual average.
Full EPA Link.
They also included a full scientific study on how it affects us, if you’re good with it I’d suggest reading up.
It also looks like the EPA and most cities started doing this back in the 1930s, so this is not a new thing Minneapolis just started doing, it’s actually been standard practice for a while.
By pure luck you got someone who’s SO worked for years making pool testing kits, and I asked them about this. They said:
If this is what you meant by “impurities”, then yes, they track carcinogens extremely closely. They also have automated testers constantly running verifying that the water that passes through is safe.
Both St Paul and Minneapolis post their carcinogen numbers, and they are both well within safety parameters.
So, again, I am not a chemist, but this is one of those things that I have extreme skepticism on when someone says we don’t have safe tap water. Our tap water is one of the only things I trust about governments because I know what happens when it doesn’t work, and when it doesn’t work we really know it doesn’t work.
And hey, even if it is flying under the radar, you can buy kits to test them, my SO confirmed it’s a pretty standard test and would show as failed immediately. If it did fail, from what I’ve read and what my SO tells me, you wouldn’t be here, you wouldn’t just be drinking bottled water, you’d be going to the press about it.
So, this stuff sounds really scary when you first read it. Hell, when I read what you said my stomach dropped, but then I thought “wait a minute, let’s find out for sure”. And by reading into it, I found out a lot of neat information and learned more about water treatment. So my main take away is that we need to stop believing what our friend told us and listen to the actual scientists. Things like water treatment sound really scary when we don’t understand that science behind it, but that’s the cool thing, we can let them. Passing on information we haven’t vetted ourselves is a dangerous thing as we’ve learned over the last few years. It’s on us to go personally validate if what we hear is true.
thank you for posting your information. and i will take some time to read through it.
also the guy i got this info from is one of the smartest individuals that i know (my brother). he has the ability to understand information in a way that many will miss.
does that mean that he is perfect? nope. he has made mistakes. and i will bring this up to him to see what he says.
but with the fact that he has tested the water, while i’m not going to blindly trust him. it does still make me concerned.
again i will bring this info to him. it should be an interesting conversation.
unrelated note here, but it will help you to understand his ability to look at things : when he messed up his heal of his foot. several doctors said there is nothing that you can do. it’s permanent. he didn’t like their answers, there was something in how they answered that just said “keep digging” . so he kept digging. he found out that if nothing is done (and time was running out) then it would be a life long issue … he would (if I remember right) he would lose permanent feeling in the heal.
he kept doing research and calling people. he found a doctor in the cities. the doctor works on Minnesota Vikings players who had the same injury. the doctor said if he operates soon. it could be fixed. it got fixed. no issues at this point.
again i’m not saying my brother is perfect, please don’t think that i am saying that he is.
he’s definitely been wrong before. but with his ability to look at things in a different way and to not give up. he’s found answers where others said there were none. he’s found problems where others have missed the issue.
again thank you for the information.
edit: there are very few people i trust at the level that i trust my brother. it’s the only reason i’m going to keep digging after you gave me the info.
Just remember to keep facts and figures as the most important thing when discerning the truth. Family may be trustworthy, they may be smart, but that doesn’t mean they’re experts in fields. You don’t need to feel bad for trusting your brother, but know their limitations too.
Absolutely correct.