Recently in my town, something has changed in how the water is being treated. The chlorine has gotten so high the water tastes terrible and may actually be causing some digestive issues. If you can't or shouldn't be drinking your tap water, you have a couple of options. You can buy a filter, or you can buy filtered water. The only home filter I trust is Zero Water, but it is quite expensive. I have discovered that our local food co-op has filtered water for sale for only 25cents per gallon. They have the reverse osmosis filter, which is the best filtration system out there. You just have to bring your own containers. I purchased 4 Crystal Geiser gallons, which we will refill, so start up cost was about $5. Buying the water at the store is actually cheaper than buying a filter, and it's an even better filtration system. If you are needing to use filtered drinking water, I highly recommend looking for this at your local grocery store.
I live in a city that has a pretty good history of decent water & I still boil it before keeping it in the fridge. I've been in the habit of doing this for years now. I never got into buying filters because it would be a consistent cost I didn't want to have to continue paying when they needed to be replaced.
Have you tried contacting the authorities? This could turn into a real problem for some people. We had an issue with the water for a couple of months and complained about it, although we use a water filter anyway just for good measure, you should not have to put up with that!
I would definitely be complaining to the city, you have a right to safe drinking water - you pay taxes and a water bill, it's their responsibility to provide it. In the meantime, I have to agree, the Zero Water filter is the only one out of the big three that I've tried - Pur and Brita being the other two, which actually filters the water so good you can very definitely taste the difference. To be quite honest, I could never really taste much of a difference in water filtered with Pur or Brita. The drawbacks with Zero Water though, aside from the obvious expense, is that it's filtering is particularly slow. So if you are drinking a lot of water throughout the day, you have to be pretty vigilant about refilling the top of the container. The Pur and Brita filters, particularly the ones you attach to your tap, are pretty wasteful, since it's so easy to accidentally leave the filtering on when you're doing other stuff like washing your hands or filling a pot of water to boil pasta - things you don't necessarily need filtered water for. 25 cents a gallon is relatively cheap I suppose to buy drinking water, but no matter how inexpensive, you're still stuck with the inconvenience of having to carry several gallons of water into your house each time. I can't even stand lugging cases of pop home from the store, or gallons of milk/juice.
In college I used a filter that filtered into reusable water bottles. It was a great investment as the water in that town was kind of gross and I saved a lot of money. It may be worth looking into.
I'm the same as you, JoanMcWench....Where I live, water straight out of the tap is clean and safe, but I still boil it too, refrigerate it and drink it like that. Every two weeks I buy a five litre bottle of bottled water and once that's gone, I go back to boiling and start all over again. The reason I do this is because I've heard that you shouldn't re-use these bottles for too long as they can become toxic. I don't know if that's true.
I don't think there is any point in complaining to the city. We are getting some water from another city now, so we don't have sat in how they treat it. I believe this other city puts fluoride in the water as well, and I will NOT have that in my water no matter what anyone tried to tell me about it.
I use a water filter for my water. I also use the Brita water jug, I don't know how well it really works but I find a huge difference in the taste so I feel like it really filters a lot out of the tap water. I never drink straight from the tap. The Brita is great and will save you a lot of money from having to buy bottled water all the time.
I go the bottled water route as well. We have 5 gallon jugs we can fill up at one of those machines out in the front of the grocery store for $1.25. We live in a rural town where we have contaminants like lead and arsenic that are at levels which are higher than recommended for consumption. Lead and arsenic are naturally occurring minerals in this part of the country, but because of the old and unregulated mining activity that used to go on around here, the levels are TOO high.
That is seriously alarming. What is your local government doing, anyway? Clean potable water is one of the basic services governments should be offering to and maintaining for their citizens. This situation is clearly something your government should be responsible for - unless you get your water supply from a private entity. Anyhow, we buy mineral water refills to save up on cost. There are also built-in water filters with the ability to enhance the PH level of water, turning it to alkaline (and more healthy at that because the human body easily becomes acidic from consuming all kinds of food).
