Of course we did. We had a partyline telephone in the house and didn't have a C'Ment swimin' hole.

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In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
Diogenes Of Sinope

Heh, Granny Clampett would say you had it easy young fellah .....

heh, I grew up out in what used to be the country in Michigan. We had well water and it was very hard. Were talking turn your whites orange hard. Drinking it took some getting used to but for washing clothes we always added Water softners to keep everything from having an orange tinge

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In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
Diogenes Of Sinope

Well Bobby, all I can say is that a few years ago we had our washing machine repaired and the engineer said that it was badly scaled up inside. Which wasn't surprising as we are in a known hard water area. So I bought a magnetic water pipe clamp for £50 and put it on the incoming mains pipe. It doesn't soften the water to the touch, it doesn't taste any better, it isn't healthier, it doesn't make your plants grow etc. All those claims are generally accepted as rubbish.

But we don't de-scale our kettle half as much as we did, and we use less detergent in the washing machine. I obviously can't see inside the pipework to check for depth of scaling, but I think the rate of build up may now be a little less. A new gas combi-boiler for a small house like ours is over £1000 these days, so every little helps.

Perhaps rather more dubious are these copper bracelets and shoe insoles that people swear by?

One of the biggest problems that we have in London is with "Hard" water, which furrs up pipes and appliances. There are various magnetic devices that you can buy and attach to incoming water pipes, but with various degrees of success.

I would imagine that magnets are about as successful at combating hard water as homeopathy is at combating malaria.

Magnets and their (mis)use.

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I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that ...

One of the biggest problems that we have in London is with "Hard" water, which furrs up pipes and appliances. There are various magnetic devices that you can buy and attach to incoming water pipes, but with various degrees of success.

New York had the best Tap water ever. It is piped down from the Catskill mountains 125 miles from the city. It had a distinct, sweet taste. This might have come from the lead pipes used in the 1800's. It came out cold and tasty.

Now I triple filter my water here in Tennessee and it tastes just fine. First I use a water softener which has a rosin core. Next I use the Insinkerator cold water tap from my hot/cold water tea maker. The Insinkerator has a large canister filter as well. This goes into a Pur water pitcher which also has a charcoal filter. Sometimes I use my Sodastream carbonator to make soda water to give the taste of fancy bottled waters.

When I owned a farm with my brothers we had a cistern to gather rain water . It had 350 lbs of charcoal to filter the water as well.

Here in Oz, bottled water is around 50cents/litre dearer than petrol ($2.00/L +). More if you buy a "trendy" brand.

As not to attract the ire of the pedantic I will not attribute this quote to PT Barnum, but, there definitely is "one born every minute".

T.A.

Texas Tap water is from local lakes. It's not necessarily bad when the lakes are full. However, the last 2 years have seen lake levels drop and a distinct foul taste that is best described and the bottom of the lake.

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In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
Diogenes Of Sinope

@Soft - I think the UK has pretty good tap water standards compared to a lot of the world, but I'm pretty sure it only meets minimum standards to avoid any public health problem. Of course it is safe to drink, but you can pay just a little extra as we are seeing, to get an enhanced product.

@John - I actually think that the product is a a sellable one, but both supermarkets in my opinion are making a pigs ear out of the marketing. If I was in charge I would be flogging it like this :-

"Extra purified water in conveniently sized bottles. We do it for you so you don't have to!"

Nah, most marketing guys are just out of the LSE and still wet behind the ears.

Desperate to boost margins, I suppose?

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It's good to be back amongst friends and colleagues

We had the Coca-cola company selling a brand name of water, Daisani I think it was? For about $1.00/half liter. They finally released its contents: tap water. No filter, no declorination, just plain tap water from whatever was handy.

I have a filter on my tap, although it certainly will not help against distillates pcb or most other chemical contamination. And this lovely city has a policy of when a well falls below standards, they pump enough water into it from their other wells to bring it to LEGAL levels. They decided it was much cheaper than drilling a new well.

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Janice

It is being reported that two UK supermarkets are selling bottled tap water at rip-off prices. It featured on the front page of that god awful rag the Mail today.

Water

This seems to me to be just another silly season story by a down market tabloid, desperate for attention.

Selling filtered and de-chlorinated tap water as cheap as 17p for two litres is a real bargain to me. If you were going out on a picnic or a day trip and wanted to take some water with you, then you would first have to find a plastic bottle, rinse it out, then fill it from the sink. And it would be mains water, which no doubt meets all the requirements of current UK regulations for purity of potable drinking water.

The point is that extra filtered and de-chlorinated water tastes better, full stop. What you are paying for is the convenience factor here, and you are getting a bargain from what I can see. This stuff could be useful for topping up aquariums and ponds. I use Aqua-safe at £10 for 500ml which is a rather more expensive alternative.

I will look into this, but I won't be buying it from Tesco as a matter of principle, as they are an unethical business. My local ASDA will be getting my patronage.

Load of fuss about nothing.