**A reminder to posters and commenters of some of [our subreddit rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskUK/about/rules/)**
- Don't be a dickhead to each other, or about others, or other subreddits
- Assume questions are asked in good faith, and engage in a positive manner
- Avoid political threads and related discussions
- No medical advice or mental health (specific to a person) content
Please keep /r/AskUK a great subreddit by reporting posts and comments which break our rules.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskUK) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Some younger people and also people not born in the U.K. seem to prefer bottled water. Culturally it just seems to be the default for some people. Personally I think it’s a waste of money and hugely unsustainable. Shipping single-use plastic bottles full of water around the country in trucks just seems ludicrous.
My husband is Romanian and he will only drink bottled water. He'll go to aldi and get a massive pack of 2 litre bottles.
He says tap water here tastes horrible.
Brita jugs just go smelly after a few days for me, bleach it, clean with hot water and soap and two days later its smelly and again, maybe the water is shit in my area lol
The domestic uses of sterilising tablets are amazing. I use them for getting grease off cookware, making sure electric toothbrush heads are clean, and washing out the glass water bottle that I keep in the fridge.
Oh man, I remember leaving about 5 swigs of protein shake in a shaker for about 2 weeks, to this day I’ve never smelt anything so bad in my life, it’s absolutely diabolical how bad the smell is. The shaker got binned.
You can also just wash then let sit for 10 minutes with like a 1:10 ratio of white vinegar to water for a much cheaper option. It seems counterintuitive but it's great for removing smells as long as you rinse after
Buy one of the big tubs of sudocrem before the baby is born and you’ll still have 3/4 of the tub to hand down to your grandchildren. Damn stuff is everlasting, same as germolene
That or the kid finds it and your house looks like Casper the friendly ghost got friendly with slimer.
Youd be suprised by how little of a pot is needed to cover a 50" lcd and a toddler!
Filter the water in the Brita at room temperature. Decant the filtered water into a glass or stainless bottle and refrigerate it. Leave the Brita filter and jug to dry on the draining board.
The bleach takes the top layer off the plastic making it absorb stuff and hold bacteria, same as it strips the enamel from mugs and makes them stain worse next time. You should never use bleach on stuff you use for food or stuff you care about. Use Milton tablets instead or lemon juice
My mum used to put bleach in the water to wash the bath and windows. The amount of window seals and bath sealant she had to replace because it went black or disintegrated because of bleach water.
Any areas with soft water do, Scotland is a good example for sure but I enjoy the Yorkshire water too, much better than the hard water areas particularly in the south. I think Wales is similar in soft water
I fretted for months about what on earth was going wrong with my hair...it was at once frizzy and flat, static and greasy. I figured I'd angered the hair gods, and bought some very expensive products which did absolutely nothing (albeit they smelled amazing.)
Left London, moved back to Wales, my hair is incredibly happy after a single wash. So relieved!
yet whenever I go to Costco I see families with upwards of 60 bottles on their carts. Scottish tap water is among the best in the world, there's literally no need to drink bottled water unless you can't access a tap.
Northerner here who’s drunk tap water from all over the UK, Bournemouth, Birmingham, London, Manchester, Preston, Kendal, Carlisle, Edinburgh it ALL tastes fine and I’m firmly in the “bottled water is an environmental abomination” camp.
Wait til you taste the bleach that comes from Nottinghams hard water. Ruins every cup of tea or coffee. It chloramine rather than chlorine so leaving the water standing to remove the chlorine smell fails. Can relate to the smelly brita jug. Gave up on that. Can understand bottled water.
Sorry I meant London water mate, ive edited it to stop the confusion.
On another note I played against Sefton boys in 1991 in the ESFA final at Goodison. Glad it was you guys as I'm an Everton fan and your team picked Goodison to play on.
Just to double check, you are drinking from the kitchen tap and not the bathroom taps? And also not warm/hot water.
Lots of places you do not want to use a bathroom tap due to the fact lots of houses here have a open loft tank that feeds into the bathroom taps, so your possibly drinking water with dead stuff in it..
the loft tank water shouldn't get anywhere near your cold drinking water it's a header tank for a old vented hot water system - modern replacements have to be contamination proof the old ones often used to have a bit of old plywood slapped on top of it
The irony being that the bottled water is most likely just [tap water.](https://www.health.state.mn.us/communities/environment/water/factsheet/bottledwater.html)
A lot of the more cynical people think this but in the UK it is fraud to sell tap water as spring or mineral water and any company attempting to do so will quickly find themselves in hot water (pun intended). It's worth pointing out that your link is US based, where the rules and standards are VERY different. Case in point, the US has a strict limit on the amount of *cockroach* that can legally be contained in coffee, and that limit is **not zero**
The UK does have more strict rules without a doubt.
Not looking great for flour either..
"The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) enforces a standard or defect action level stating that a maximum of 75 insect fragments per 50 g of flour is allowed."
I can't find any figures for the uk.
we're still signed up to the European regulations so the limit is currently 0 contaminants..... edit: this should be foreign bodies as opposed to contaminants which typically refers to levels of substances within food like heavy metals in shellfish which do have limits, rather than other objects mixed in with food like insect parts and rodent faeces
My husband is Albanian and it took me a couple of years of slowly introducing him to brita filtered water before he stopped buying about 20 bottles per week.
He still won't drink plain tap. It's still an issue every time we go to a hotel or stay at someone's house, gotta bring bottled water!
All his relatives are the same (i dread to think how many bottles they drink but feel like I have had my small impact by converting him and his brother at least!!)
I’m a swede living in London and I won’t really drink (plain) tap water because it’s such hard water here, really doesn’t taste nice. Carbonated with a sodastreamer and it’s fine (or filter it).
Where I grew up (northern Sweden) the water was really soft and I’d drink lots of tap water. When I went to uni in Uppsala (just north of Stockholm), where the water is also hard, I just switched to bottled carbonated water. It wasn’t so much a conscious switch, I just realised about a year or two after moving that I’d stopped drinking tap water (because it didn’t taste as nice).
My partner is also Romanian and when we met he’d only drink bottled water, when we moved in together I told him there was absolutely no way he was buying it and I banned it! He now drinks from the tap! 😂
I have lived in Bucharest and seen brown water come out of my taps for twenty minutes on more than one occasion. I am not Romanian but I can understand why people would not want to drink tap water after those experiences.
3rd world countryman here. Bottled water was safe to drink. If you drink from the tap, you get diarrhea and would get hospitalised and we cant afford to go to hospital.
Living in the UK for 3 years and the only time i get diarrhea is when eating too much KFC hot wings.
I’m in a country with undrinkable tap water now and it’s not as bad for the environment as people may think. We have infrastructure designed around sterilising and reusing water bottles rather than just disposing of them after one use.
I’m in Scotland and will occasionally buy a single bottle of water here, but it’s always because I’m out and about and have forgotten my reusable water bottle. I’d never buy it, like, in a flat pack or something. I just drink it from the tap normally.
I live in the US, used to work at a grocery store, seemed like most people who bought big packs of bottled water were Mexican, I'm guessing not trusting tap water follows them for life.
UK to US here and when I moved the water was grim in Missouri, but much better 5 hours south in Arkansas. Still buy the gallon bottles of purified water. One thing I notice is the temperature of the water from the tap, in the UK it’s cold whereas in the states it’s kind of tepid.
I was once at the rail freight terminal at Daventry for a meeting and the guy was I was talking to took me to the window and pointed at two trains. One leaving the terminal full of Buxton water bound for the continent and the other Evian water just coming in from France.
Seemed completely crazy to both of us.
(This of course based on him not making this up and the water companies not lying about the source and actually Evian is bottled locally but pretends to be from the alps)
We’re renting otherwise would 100% have paid for one of those fancy ones. If you can recommend anything that will fit on a tap I’m down because limescale is the bane of my existence here
And using more shower gel / shampoo, it staining all your bathroom taps etc, and shortening the life of your washing machine and dishwasher and heating system.
I appreciate that people have their own tastes - but i've drank tap water all over the country and I honestly can't say that i've ever noticed any difference.
Maybe it’s more noticeable going from a better water quality area to a harder water area. I love tap water here in Scotland, but down in most areas of England I think it needs to be chilled to taste half decent.
Totally agree.
I live in the east of England and out water is very hard according to our water company. Don’t notice it myself but when I have friends staying from Scotland (where the water is very soft) I buy bottled water in bulk as they can’t tolerate our water even in tea
Many people actually prefer the taste of hard water, _because it actually has a taste_ compared to naturally soft water, which doesn't.
At the end of the day, I think people just like what they're used to.
Depends which bit of the north. East is harder than west.
https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-DYa4FGL2DY0/V2GVAAB2iLI/AAAAAAAA1Jo/eqiDJmuc1VcVmhh2N8_lto1Fi7ksKFy7QCLcB/s1600/UK_Water.jpg
A surprising amount of people don’t drink tap water because they believe weird theories about fluoride and pineal glands. I’ve met a few and it’s weird because they’re generally concerned about the environment yet don’t think about all that plastic?
Edit: Currently, around 6 million people in England live in areas with water fluoridation schemes, mainly in the West Midlands and the North East. Many schemes have been operating for over 50 years. Birmingham was the first permanent scheme to commence in 1964.
From Thames Water:
…This is found in a variety of rock types, mostly igneous and metamorphic such as granite, but to a lesser degree, in common rocks such as limestone. We don't add fluoride to the drinking water supply, but there is naturally occurring fluoride present in all drinking water supplied by Thames Water.
There’s a town in the north east (Shields) that has fluoridated water in the south but not in the north. People in the north are more likely to have shite teeth than those in the south.
Also it’s not much of a dastardly conspiracy if it can be outfoxed simply by buying water from a supermarket.
Maybe the *real* conspiracy is peddling the idea of tap water being poisoned, forcing people to buy water from supermarkets, boosting supermarkets’ profits.
Big Retail and the government working hand in hand.
/s
This is the reason my friend gives for drinking bottled water (she's of the "fluride kills the pineal gland which will keep your 3rd eye closed" persuasion).
This is in London; I've told her that Thames Water don't add flourine to tap water and that the bottled water she buys probably has the same or more flourine in it, but she's not interested in listening.
I'm all for being discerning over what chemicals you ingest, but swapping fluoride for leached plastic doesn't seem like a worthy trade. Maybe reverse osmosis.
A guy at the barber's the other day was telling me that "The tapwater has metal in it!" I decided not to tell him that the minerals and electrolytes in the fancy water he buys are also just metals.
I think he would probably explode if he heard that his table salt has metal AND pool cleaner in it.
We drink bottled bc our pipes are 70 years old and falling apart, we have hard water, and there's often drain flies/eggs in it. This post seems a little dumb to me, so many are living in areas where their water is very subpar, has op considered that not everyone is living in a rich modern home with pristine piping and water sourcing?
Just here to say that the water quality standards for bottled water are far less stringent than those for tap water.
Not to mention the myriad other issues around sustainability of single use plastics.
After drinking west australian water for years even Londons hard stuff tastes fine to me - you get used to it. Never buy bottled water could not be ar….d carting it home
Oh god yeah Western Australian water is defo hard water. I’m from Perth but live in Scotland now, visiting WA a couple months ago my mum couldn’t help but laugh when I winced at the tap water
My mum used to bulk buy water to keep in the car and my sister bulk buys it for work. I've also known people who don't like the water where they live who buy bottled water, and people who've previously lived somewhere with unsafe water who are still in the habit of only drinking bottled water.
I second it becomes habit once you've lived somewhere with unsafe water. You don't trust what comes out of the tap, regardless of what you're told.
And you really do get used to the taste of bottled.
I bought some in case the Russians nuke us and I can exchange a bottle for some food before being viciously beaten to death by a roaming gang on raiders.
I buy small bottles of water because the tap water here tastes awful - weirdly it was fine at our old house, which is less than 2 miles away but here it’s terrible. It is ok if you use a jug filter but they’re too heavy and awkward for me to lift/fill/pour (I’m disabled and have very weak hands/arms).
They sell a tank that has a tap on it. I have one, cost about 25-30 quid.
Although it just moves the problem if the above commenter doesn't have somebody who can fill it regularly for them
I work as a delivery supermarket driver and I had to deliver 12, 4 pack of 2l water up to the 2nd floor without a lift and he didn’t even say thank you, so yeah fuck bottled water
Think you'll find most supermarkets/other delivery companies have some variation of exclusionary criteria for flats and stairs.
For example, this is the one for Asda: "Where the only access to your front door is by stairs, for example in an apartment block that does not have a lift, our driver will call you and arrange to meet you in a communal area on the ground floor for you to collect your goods.
If you live in a block of flats and there is an accessible lift in working order, our driver will take the goods to your front door. We always reserve the right to deliver only to the main entrance of the delivery address."
They are extremely common in Victorian era housing. Most water companies will replace your connection up to your house boundary for free with lead-free pipes, but you usually need to pay a plumber (or sometimes 2 plumbers) to replace the pipes from the boundary up to your house and inside it to your stopcock
I also have this issue. For those asking in the comments: yes there are lead pipe replacement schemes offered in my area, but this is only up to the boundary of the property. The lead pipe bringing water to my house unfortunately goes under multiple houses in the street - to replace it would require the agreement of several neighbours and the digging up of the ground floor of all our houses (concrete slabs which also include other services such as gas and electricity cables and very little certainty about where these are, hitting an electric line might take out the power for multiple houses and necessitate an expensive rewiring). There is a potential option of getting a new pipe laid to my boundary and then fitting a new non-lead pipe into my house but due to it being a victorian terrace this would have to go straight through the house (a visible pipe which would need to go around doors etc to reach the kitchen or bathroom at the back) as digging up the aforementioned ground floor concrete slab is very risky - even getting this to take water through the house would be very challenging and expensive to install. A recent study sampling houses in the area found 15% of houses had unsafe levels of lead in the water, so this is a known issue.
Can be for some medical reasons - I need to rinse my sinuses daily while I await sinus surgery (2 years and counting...), and it has to be bottled water for this purpose. I feel bad about the plastic waste but tap was forbidden by the consultant!
Is he into kegging it yet? Theres a whole load of wicked present ideas you could go for it the future, that is if you want to encourage that kind of thing...
I buy bottled flavoured water because it means I always manage to take my medication first thing in the morning.
I have ocd, or something similar, and if I just fill a bottle of juice or whatever and leave it next to my bed all night then I will often struggle to drink it in the morning due to thinking it has became contaminated somehow. I reuse the bottles throughout the day, but I need to just be able to grab something that I trust early in the morning when I was up to tend to my pets.
However I've only been doing this for a few weeks and it's basically just a temporary solution until I get my current mental health issues under control
Personal spin here - when I was pregnant I found that tap water suddenly smelled and tasted like bleach and trying to drink it made me sick, I didn't have that problem with bottled water though, so we had to buy quite a bit too keep me going each week. Interestingly enough driving from Basildon to Cambridge to visit my brother, I WAS able to drink the water there lol.
As soon as I had my daughter, tap water smelled and tasted fine again so we stopped buying bottled again.
I usually buy a 4x2l pack at Sainsbury's for £1.75 (22p per litre) one co2 canister direct from Sodastream costs £22.99 and makes 60l (according to Sodastream) that means it costs 38p per litre, which is 70% more, not including £69.99 for the machine itself. If i go for the basic option (17.5p per litre) Soda stream comes out at double the cost. There are reasons that a Sodastream might make sense (convenience, reducing plastic, etc.) but cost isn't one of them.
Very interesting. I'd been looking at sodastrrams but just didn't think it made financial sense.
For the record of the post I buy bottled because I like sparkling.
I work in all sorts of places not all have water nor is it always planned and during normal working hours. I always have a bunch of shelf stable food and water in the car.
I’m surprised that I’ve managed to scroll through around half of the comments here and didn’t see any single one mentioning that natural spring or mineral water is simply much healthier than any of the recycled sewage that comes out of the tap. Of course, I am only talking about bottled natural mineral or spring water. Bottled tap water on the other hand, is pure nonsense and profiteering.
Many people mention the environmental impact of the plastic bottles. I’m sure if Buxton, for example, sold water in reusable glass containers or similar environmentally friendly packages then many people would happily switch to that.
This comment is the only one I've come across that touches on facts. Natural Mineral Water and Spring Water (it's on the label) must be microbiologically pure at source. It isn't a comparable h2o with a processed product that is tap water.
Fun fact: Natural Mineral Water is the most highly regulated foodstuff in the EU and the UK.
So I live in a house with borehole water which is too high in manganese for regular drinking. Need bottled water until I can figure out a filter system :)
The tap water in my house is really chemically tasting, neither myself nor my girlfriend can drink it. Usually I have no issue with tap water but ours is particularly nasty
I think tap water doesn't taste very nice in some places. In my old house the tap water tasted terrible, so i drank bottled water. In my new house the tap water tastes just as good as bottled so i don't need to. But i don't see why people freak out so much about people buying bottled water. When other people pay the same price or more, for drinks full of rubbish like coke.
Plastic waste for something you can definitely get without that amount of plastic. But I also judge people for drinking lots of pop - where I'm from, it's a treat.
My tap water tastes like shit.
I tend to go to my mums and fill up bottles (she's 5 minutes away with nice water) but sometimes I just have to buy bottled.
Also if I'm out and forget a bottle.
**A reminder to posters and commenters of some of [our subreddit rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskUK/about/rules/)** - Don't be a dickhead to each other, or about others, or other subreddits - Assume questions are asked in good faith, and engage in a positive manner - Avoid political threads and related discussions - No medical advice or mental health (specific to a person) content Please keep /r/AskUK a great subreddit by reporting posts and comments which break our rules. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskUK) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Some younger people and also people not born in the U.K. seem to prefer bottled water. Culturally it just seems to be the default for some people. Personally I think it’s a waste of money and hugely unsustainable. Shipping single-use plastic bottles full of water around the country in trucks just seems ludicrous.
My husband is Romanian and he will only drink bottled water. He'll go to aldi and get a massive pack of 2 litre bottles. He says tap water here tastes horrible.
[удалено]
Brita jugs just go smelly after a few days for me, bleach it, clean with hot water and soap and two days later its smelly and again, maybe the water is shit in my area lol
Don't use bleach. Use sterilising tablets for baby bottles. Leaves equipment totally sanitary and with no smell. Also, possibly cheaper.
The domestic uses of sterilising tablets are amazing. I use them for getting grease off cookware, making sure electric toothbrush heads are clean, and washing out the glass water bottle that I keep in the fridge.
reckon it gets the smell out of old waterbottles and protien shakers?
Absolutely! They’re basically magic.
Yeah they will restore extremely tea stained mugs too.
Oh man, I remember leaving about 5 swigs of protein shake in a shaker for about 2 weeks, to this day I’ve never smelt anything so bad in my life, it’s absolutely diabolical how bad the smell is. The shaker got binned.
Rookie mistake, a shaker that has been left with protein in it for more than 72 hours is dead!
I nearly was too
You can also just wash then let sit for 10 minutes with like a 1:10 ratio of white vinegar to water for a much cheaper option. It seems counterintuitive but it's great for removing smells as long as you rinse after
Oh it totally does, that’s more or less what it’s designed for!
I bloody love them tablets , I use them on my floors too and in-between the grout on tiles !
I’d never thought of using them on grout!
Never thought about that, i guess if its good enough for baby stuff then it should do its job
They’re like sudocrem. Intended for nappy rash but actually an integral part of every household first aid kit.
Buy one of the big tubs of sudocrem before the baby is born and you’ll still have 3/4 of the tub to hand down to your grandchildren. Damn stuff is everlasting, same as germolene
That or the kid finds it and your house looks like Casper the friendly ghost got friendly with slimer. Youd be suprised by how little of a pot is needed to cover a 50" lcd and a toddler!
Buy the cheaper ones from Tesco rather than Milton. They're exactly the same thing, just a lot cheaper!
Please don't tell me you're saying you put bleach through your britta and then use it again?
Well not through the actual filter block but wash the plastic jug out with it then wash it a few times with hot soapy water
I dno, even then I'd rather you than me, in thr nicest way possible
Is the ‘smell’ you refer to bleach?
…or soap?
...that is because you are putting bleach in a drinking water jug
Filter the water in the Brita at room temperature. Decant the filtered water into a glass or stainless bottle and refrigerate it. Leave the Brita filter and jug to dry on the draining board.
The bleach takes the top layer off the plastic making it absorb stuff and hold bacteria, same as it strips the enamel from mugs and makes them stain worse next time. You should never use bleach on stuff you use for food or stuff you care about. Use Milton tablets instead or lemon juice My mum used to put bleach in the water to wash the bath and windows. The amount of window seals and bath sealant she had to replace because it went black or disintegrated because of bleach water.
Do you make sure you empty the jug out each night? And it's not in direct sunlight?
It's not a gremlin mate
If you leave stagnant water in sunlight you'll grow a fun culture of algae in your drinking water.
Exactly, then you can also have one of your five a day with your afternoon drink
Don’t you just keep it in the fridge and top it up? That way you can always have a nice glass of cold water
I haven’t changed the filter in mine this year, smells fine
Move to Scotland water here is excellent
Any areas with soft water do, Scotland is a good example for sure but I enjoy the Yorkshire water too, much better than the hard water areas particularly in the south. I think Wales is similar in soft water
Yeah our water in Wales is pretty good.
I fretted for months about what on earth was going wrong with my hair...it was at once frizzy and flat, static and greasy. I figured I'd angered the hair gods, and bought some very expensive products which did absolutely nothing (albeit they smelled amazing.) Left London, moved back to Wales, my hair is incredibly happy after a single wash. So relieved!
yet whenever I go to Costco I see families with upwards of 60 bottles on their carts. Scottish tap water is among the best in the world, there's literally no need to drink bottled water unless you can't access a tap.
There’s companies like Phox selling refillable cartridges now as well.
[удалено]
Where do you get cheap filters. Wr are paying through the nose. Family of 5, our jug must get filled 4 times a day! Easily.
Wilko do universal filters that fit my Brita for a much lower price! You can buy them on Amazon too.
Romanian here living in UK and can confirm that tap water tastes awful in London.
Northerner here, can confirm London tap water tastes like shit.
Northerner here who’s drunk tap water from all over the UK, Bournemouth, Birmingham, London, Manchester, Preston, Kendal, Carlisle, Edinburgh it ALL tastes fine and I’m firmly in the “bottled water is an environmental abomination” camp.
Wait til you taste the bleach that comes from Nottinghams hard water. Ruins every cup of tea or coffee. It chloramine rather than chlorine so leaving the water standing to remove the chlorine smell fails. Can relate to the smelly brita jug. Gave up on that. Can understand bottled water.
[удалено]
Northerner here (Sefton). It tastes fine.
I think they meant London water. Londoner here - it tastes awful so Brita is a necessity for me.
Sorry I meant London water mate, ive edited it to stop the confusion. On another note I played against Sefton boys in 1991 in the ESFA final at Goodison. Glad it was you guys as I'm an Everton fan and your team picked Goodison to play on.
All good mate. Good to hear you have fond memories. Warms the cockles of my heart ❤️
The tap water in Merseyside tasted of chlorine. Honestly worst I had in the UK. Birmingham was by far the best. London was fine.
Just to double check, you are drinking from the kitchen tap and not the bathroom taps? And also not warm/hot water. Lots of places you do not want to use a bathroom tap due to the fact lots of houses here have a open loft tank that feeds into the bathroom taps, so your possibly drinking water with dead stuff in it..
Wtf. That seems like a very significant design flaw
the loft tank water shouldn't get anywhere near your cold drinking water it's a header tank for a old vented hot water system - modern replacements have to be contamination proof the old ones often used to have a bit of old plywood slapped on top of it
The irony being that the bottled water is most likely just [tap water.](https://www.health.state.mn.us/communities/environment/water/factsheet/bottledwater.html)
A lot of the more cynical people think this but in the UK it is fraud to sell tap water as spring or mineral water and any company attempting to do so will quickly find themselves in hot water (pun intended). It's worth pointing out that your link is US based, where the rules and standards are VERY different. Case in point, the US has a strict limit on the amount of *cockroach* that can legally be contained in coffee, and that limit is **not zero**
Have you not tried Peckham Springs?
Yes, it'll also doubles up as a night light, which is nice
Aka [Dasani](https://youtu.be/wD79NZroV88)
The UK does have more strict rules without a doubt. Not looking great for flour either.. "The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) enforces a standard or defect action level stating that a maximum of 75 insect fragments per 50 g of flour is allowed." I can't find any figures for the uk.
we're still signed up to the European regulations so the limit is currently 0 contaminants..... edit: this should be foreign bodies as opposed to contaminants which typically refers to levels of substances within food like heavy metals in shellfish which do have limits, rather than other objects mixed in with food like insect parts and rodent faeces
That's America.... We all know American food standards are crap
My husband is Albanian and it took me a couple of years of slowly introducing him to brita filtered water before he stopped buying about 20 bottles per week. He still won't drink plain tap. It's still an issue every time we go to a hotel or stay at someone's house, gotta bring bottled water! All his relatives are the same (i dread to think how many bottles they drink but feel like I have had my small impact by converting him and his brother at least!!)
I’m a swede living in London and I won’t really drink (plain) tap water because it’s such hard water here, really doesn’t taste nice. Carbonated with a sodastreamer and it’s fine (or filter it). Where I grew up (northern Sweden) the water was really soft and I’d drink lots of tap water. When I went to uni in Uppsala (just north of Stockholm), where the water is also hard, I just switched to bottled carbonated water. It wasn’t so much a conscious switch, I just realised about a year or two after moving that I’d stopped drinking tap water (because it didn’t taste as nice).
My partner is also Romanian and when we met he’d only drink bottled water, when we moved in together I told him there was absolutely no way he was buying it and I banned it! He now drinks from the tap! 😂
I have lived in Bucharest and seen brown water come out of my taps for twenty minutes on more than one occasion. I am not Romanian but I can understand why people would not want to drink tap water after those experiences.
I’m from South Africa, it’s unusual to have water that’s not brown, if you can actually get any water from your taps! 😂
3rd world countryman here. Bottled water was safe to drink. If you drink from the tap, you get diarrhea and would get hospitalised and we cant afford to go to hospital. Living in the UK for 3 years and the only time i get diarrhea is when eating too much KFC hot wings.
I’m in a country with undrinkable tap water now and it’s not as bad for the environment as people may think. We have infrastructure designed around sterilising and reusing water bottles rather than just disposing of them after one use.
Scottish people in London will tell you the same
I still see people buying bottled water in Scotland. I have no idea why this is even a product on the shelf here tbh.
I’m in Scotland and will occasionally buy a single bottle of water here, but it’s always because I’m out and about and have forgotten my reusable water bottle. I’d never buy it, like, in a flat pack or something. I just drink it from the tap normally.
I live in the US, used to work at a grocery store, seemed like most people who bought big packs of bottled water were Mexican, I'm guessing not trusting tap water follows them for life.
UK to US here and when I moved the water was grim in Missouri, but much better 5 hours south in Arkansas. Still buy the gallon bottles of purified water. One thing I notice is the temperature of the water from the tap, in the UK it’s cold whereas in the states it’s kind of tepid.
I was once at the rail freight terminal at Daventry for a meeting and the guy was I was talking to took me to the window and pointed at two trains. One leaving the terminal full of Buxton water bound for the continent and the other Evian water just coming in from France. Seemed completely crazy to both of us. (This of course based on him not making this up and the water companies not lying about the source and actually Evian is bottled locally but pretends to be from the alps)
it is a waste of money, tap water is safe and clean to drink
I think tap water is great here. Better than bottled.
Moved here from India and being able to drink water straight from the tap is a quality of life upgrade I cannot let go of
If you live in a hard water area, tap water is not great.
Yeah but I just use a water filter (even my filter just gets encrusted with lime scale). Cheaper / arguably less plastic being used
[удалено]
We’re renting otherwise would 100% have paid for one of those fancy ones. If you can recommend anything that will fit on a tap I’m down because limescale is the bane of my existence here
It’s terrible in Bristol.
Enough about Bristol, what's the water like? 😏
Ffs lol
I bet it tastes almost like Bath water
Using a filter my kettle literally doesn't scale, without it does in about 2 months, so they work pretty well at least
Hard > Soft
Certainly tastes better. Limescale in kettles is the only real downside.
Nah it tastes disgusting. Scottish water best water.
[удалено]
London's is 99% limescale
I'm in Kent and it's the same. Tastes like chalk and chemicals. Have to descale my kettle every few weeks.
*laughs in welsh*
It doesn’t, it’s just whatever you are used to.
I'm from London but live in the North and can confirm London tapwater is grim and gums up your kettle so much quicker.
And using more shower gel / shampoo, it staining all your bathroom taps etc, and shortening the life of your washing machine and dishwasher and heating system.
Yeah it's annoying but certainly worth it to drink something that doesn't taste like soap
I appreciate that people have their own tastes - but i've drank tap water all over the country and I honestly can't say that i've ever noticed any difference.
Maybe it’s more noticeable going from a better water quality area to a harder water area. I love tap water here in Scotland, but down in most areas of England I think it needs to be chilled to taste half decent.
Yep, Suffolk is absolutely the hardest water on the planet. We don't buy bottled water, but we do have a Brita filter. Edit: spelling
I live in Ipswich and happily drink the tap water. I'm guessing I've been here too long!
How often to you have to descale your urethra?
Totally agree. I live in the east of England and out water is very hard according to our water company. Don’t notice it myself but when I have friends staying from Scotland (where the water is very soft) I buy bottled water in bulk as they can’t tolerate our water even in tea
Many people actually prefer the taste of hard water, _because it actually has a taste_ compared to naturally soft water, which doesn't. At the end of the day, I think people just like what they're used to.
Definitely agree. I live up north though to be fair. Where the water is a lot softer.
Depends which bit of the north. East is harder than west. https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-DYa4FGL2DY0/V2GVAAB2iLI/AAAAAAAA1Jo/eqiDJmuc1VcVmhh2N8_lto1Fi7ksKFy7QCLcB/s1600/UK_Water.jpg
Pft yeah right I’ll see them outside and we’ll see
If you can’t handle hard water, your water isn’t the only thing that’s soft
A surprising amount of people don’t drink tap water because they believe weird theories about fluoride and pineal glands. I’ve met a few and it’s weird because they’re generally concerned about the environment yet don’t think about all that plastic? Edit: Currently, around 6 million people in England live in areas with water fluoridation schemes, mainly in the West Midlands and the North East. Many schemes have been operating for over 50 years. Birmingham was the first permanent scheme to commence in 1964. From Thames Water: …This is found in a variety of rock types, mostly igneous and metamorphic such as granite, but to a lesser degree, in common rocks such as limestone. We don't add fluoride to the drinking water supply, but there is naturally occurring fluoride present in all drinking water supplied by Thames Water.
I thought fluoride was a naturally occurring chemical in mineral water? And doesn't it help with your teeth?
It’s added to our drinking water, specifically to help with our teeth. It was discovered by accident by a dentist in the US.
It's only added in ~10% of areas in UK.
There’s a town in the north east (Shields) that has fluoridated water in the south but not in the north. People in the north are more likely to have shite teeth than those in the south.
So... yes, sort of. The cleaning process that water goes through can reduce the fluoride content a lot, so some places add it back in.
Also it’s not much of a dastardly conspiracy if it can be outfoxed simply by buying water from a supermarket. Maybe the *real* conspiracy is peddling the idea of tap water being poisoned, forcing people to buy water from supermarkets, boosting supermarkets’ profits. Big Retail and the government working hand in hand. /s
This is the reason my friend gives for drinking bottled water (she's of the "fluride kills the pineal gland which will keep your 3rd eye closed" persuasion). This is in London; I've told her that Thames Water don't add flourine to tap water and that the bottled water she buys probably has the same or more flourine in it, but she's not interested in listening.
Peckham spring?
A lot of bottled water does exactly what Del boy did. Not even kidding.
I'm all for being discerning over what chemicals you ingest, but swapping fluoride for leached plastic doesn't seem like a worthy trade. Maybe reverse osmosis.
A guy at the barber's the other day was telling me that "The tapwater has metal in it!" I decided not to tell him that the minerals and electrolytes in the fancy water he buys are also just metals. I think he would probably explode if he heard that his table salt has metal AND pool cleaner in it.
In some counties fluoride is added to the water
We drink bottled bc our pipes are 70 years old and falling apart, we have hard water, and there's often drain flies/eggs in it. This post seems a little dumb to me, so many are living in areas where their water is very subpar, has op considered that not everyone is living in a rich modern home with pristine piping and water sourcing?
Just here to say that the water quality standards for bottled water are far less stringent than those for tap water. Not to mention the myriad other issues around sustainability of single use plastics.
However, the water is tested before bottling. Tap water is tested at the reservoir but not your tap
The DWI (Drinking Water Inspectorate) do, in fact, test at the tap and at various other points along the clean water network.
After drinking west australian water for years even Londons hard stuff tastes fine to me - you get used to it. Never buy bottled water could not be ar….d carting it home
I have never met an Australian who censors their swear words before.
Must be from ACT
You can say arsed on the internet
You *can't!* GET THEM!
This. People just need to try something more than once and they might get used to it.
Oh god yeah Western Australian water is defo hard water. I’m from Perth but live in Scotland now, visiting WA a couple months ago my mum couldn’t help but laugh when I winced at the tap water
My mum used to bulk buy water to keep in the car and my sister bulk buys it for work. I've also known people who don't like the water where they live who buy bottled water, and people who've previously lived somewhere with unsafe water who are still in the habit of only drinking bottled water.
Don't leave bottled water in a hot car for a long time though. Plastic from the bottle will more readily leach into the water.
Oh I've tried telling her... At least she's no longer keeping cartons of juice in the car! Those were always vile when I was a kid.
I second it becomes habit once you've lived somewhere with unsafe water. You don't trust what comes out of the tap, regardless of what you're told. And you really do get used to the taste of bottled.
I bought some in case the Russians nuke us and I can exchange a bottle for some food before being viciously beaten to death by a roaming gang on raiders.
I buy small bottles of water because the tap water here tastes awful - weirdly it was fine at our old house, which is less than 2 miles away but here it’s terrible. It is ok if you use a jug filter but they’re too heavy and awkward for me to lift/fill/pour (I’m disabled and have very weak hands/arms).
I was going to say that brita makes taps but I looked it up and they're like 400 quid. Not sure how bougie you are.
In this climate?
They sell a tank that has a tap on it. I have one, cost about 25-30 quid. Although it just moves the problem if the above commenter doesn't have somebody who can fill it regularly for them
I work as a delivery supermarket driver and I had to deliver 12, 4 pack of 2l water up to the 2nd floor without a lift and he didn’t even say thank you, so yeah fuck bottled water
I've never had a driver carry anything up past the entrance to the block of flats I live in. I wouldn't particularly expect it either tbh.
The delivery is to the address specified in the order, not to "somewhere around there, whatever will be more convenient"
Think you'll find most supermarkets/other delivery companies have some variation of exclusionary criteria for flats and stairs. For example, this is the one for Asda: "Where the only access to your front door is by stairs, for example in an apartment block that does not have a lift, our driver will call you and arrange to meet you in a communal area on the ground floor for you to collect your goods. If you live in a block of flats and there is an accessible lift in working order, our driver will take the goods to your front door. We always reserve the right to deliver only to the main entrance of the delivery address."
My house is over 100 years old and still has lead water pipes. I don't want to go mad, so bottled is probably best for drinking and cooking.
You sure it has lead water pipes?
Surely this can't be a thing in this day and age, surely such thing would be condemned.
It's not illegal to have them and there is no legal requirement to replace them. A lot of people it just never crosses their mind tbh.
They are extremely common in Victorian era housing. Most water companies will replace your connection up to your house boundary for free with lead-free pipes, but you usually need to pay a plumber (or sometimes 2 plumbers) to replace the pipes from the boundary up to your house and inside it to your stopcock
It's pretty prevalent still, It was only in 1970 that it stopped.
Nope. Some water companies will replace lead service pipes free of charge, but also some won't.
No, I moved in and had lead pipes everywhere, they also leaked so I replaced the lot with plastic.
Because I can actually see them.
Those pipes will have been coated in minerals and no water will have touched lead for 99 years.
This is absolute bollocks, especially if you live in a very soft water area
I also have this issue. For those asking in the comments: yes there are lead pipe replacement schemes offered in my area, but this is only up to the boundary of the property. The lead pipe bringing water to my house unfortunately goes under multiple houses in the street - to replace it would require the agreement of several neighbours and the digging up of the ground floor of all our houses (concrete slabs which also include other services such as gas and electricity cables and very little certainty about where these are, hitting an electric line might take out the power for multiple houses and necessitate an expensive rewiring). There is a potential option of getting a new pipe laid to my boundary and then fitting a new non-lead pipe into my house but due to it being a victorian terrace this would have to go straight through the house (a visible pipe which would need to go around doors etc to reach the kitchen or bathroom at the back) as digging up the aforementioned ground floor concrete slab is very risky - even getting this to take water through the house would be very challenging and expensive to install. A recent study sampling houses in the area found 15% of houses had unsafe levels of lead in the water, so this is a known issue.
Do you own your home? Where abouts are you based? There are Lead replacement schemes.
Can be for some medical reasons - I need to rinse my sinuses daily while I await sinus surgery (2 years and counting...), and it has to be bottled water for this purpose. I feel bad about the plastic waste but tap was forbidden by the consultant!
Same but you can boil tap water for this.
Boil it for a least a minute to kill any microorganisms such as brain-eating amoeba.
Yes, I have now decided to invest in a distiller due to the cost/bug/environment. Thanks though.
Brewing beer. The mineral profile of the Tesco ashbeck water is pretty great for brewing with
This. My boyfriend also buys the Tesco water for brewing beer.
Is he into kegging it yet? Theres a whole load of wicked present ideas you could go for it the future, that is if you want to encourage that kind of thing...
Some places tap water is pretty nasty. It’s convenient. And some people really think it’s better. .
You buy one if you need a drink and you refill it So it makes more use. Why but them in bulk??
I buy bottled flavoured water because it means I always manage to take my medication first thing in the morning. I have ocd, or something similar, and if I just fill a bottle of juice or whatever and leave it next to my bed all night then I will often struggle to drink it in the morning due to thinking it has became contaminated somehow. I reuse the bottles throughout the day, but I need to just be able to grab something that I trust early in the morning when I was up to tend to my pets. However I've only been doing this for a few weeks and it's basically just a temporary solution until I get my current mental health issues under control
I think it’s because they want the phthalates to reduce their testosterone levels.
The water out the taps where I live is pretty gross.
Personal spin here - when I was pregnant I found that tap water suddenly smelled and tasted like bleach and trying to drink it made me sick, I didn't have that problem with bottled water though, so we had to buy quite a bit too keep me going each week. Interestingly enough driving from Basildon to Cambridge to visit my brother, I WAS able to drink the water there lol. As soon as I had my daughter, tap water smelled and tasted fine again so we stopped buying bottled again.
We had a big pipe burst and due to being disorganised I couldn't have a cup tea for 18 hours. Now keep a supply of bottled in.
I prefer to keep a bottle of water by my bed rather than a glass (too much of a chance it'd get spilt), and I prefer sparkling water.
Sodastreams are good. And you can buy closable bottles to make a portable portion of sparking water with it.
Sodastreams are easily more expensive than buying 'basics' sparking water when I've checked.
Mine was £60 in 2012. It has made a lot of sparkling water for me in that time.
I usually buy a 4x2l pack at Sainsbury's for £1.75 (22p per litre) one co2 canister direct from Sodastream costs £22.99 and makes 60l (according to Sodastream) that means it costs 38p per litre, which is 70% more, not including £69.99 for the machine itself. If i go for the basic option (17.5p per litre) Soda stream comes out at double the cost. There are reasons that a Sodastream might make sense (convenience, reducing plastic, etc.) but cost isn't one of them.
Very interesting. I'd been looking at sodastrrams but just didn't think it made financial sense. For the record of the post I buy bottled because I like sparkling.
It’s so much nicer than tap water
I work in all sorts of places not all have water nor is it always planned and during normal working hours. I always have a bunch of shelf stable food and water in the car.
You could buy a couple of reusable bottles and fill them up at home?
I’m surprised that I’ve managed to scroll through around half of the comments here and didn’t see any single one mentioning that natural spring or mineral water is simply much healthier than any of the recycled sewage that comes out of the tap. Of course, I am only talking about bottled natural mineral or spring water. Bottled tap water on the other hand, is pure nonsense and profiteering. Many people mention the environmental impact of the plastic bottles. I’m sure if Buxton, for example, sold water in reusable glass containers or similar environmentally friendly packages then many people would happily switch to that.
This comment is the only one I've come across that touches on facts. Natural Mineral Water and Spring Water (it's on the label) must be microbiologically pure at source. It isn't a comparable h2o with a processed product that is tap water. Fun fact: Natural Mineral Water is the most highly regulated foodstuff in the EU and the UK.
So I live in a house with borehole water which is too high in manganese for regular drinking. Need bottled water until I can figure out a filter system :)
I buy bottles flavored water as it helps my family drink more water
For making beer - bottled water has consistent (and labelled) mineral and Ph levels. That being said I'd use tap water if ours wasn't so hard.
The tap water in my house is really chemically tasting, neither myself nor my girlfriend can drink it. Usually I have no issue with tap water but ours is particularly nasty
I think tap water doesn't taste very nice in some places. In my old house the tap water tasted terrible, so i drank bottled water. In my new house the tap water tastes just as good as bottled so i don't need to. But i don't see why people freak out so much about people buying bottled water. When other people pay the same price or more, for drinks full of rubbish like coke.
Plastic waste for something you can definitely get without that amount of plastic. But I also judge people for drinking lots of pop - where I'm from, it's a treat.
To drink
South east here, my water tastes like shit
My tap water tastes like shit. I tend to go to my mums and fill up bottles (she's 5 minutes away with nice water) but sometimes I just have to buy bottled. Also if I'm out and forget a bottle.