How to Get Great Tasting Water

How to get great tasting water. The tap is chlorinated and bottled water is questionable. Is there any great tasting water?Everyone keeps telling you that you need to drink water. Just about everything else is bad for you, but the problem is the taste. Water just tastes bad. If only you knew how to get great tasting water.

Chlorinated Water Tastes Bad

It’s even harder when you grow up with good water and then can’t get it anymore.

I grew up out in the country where a well is your only option for water. Our water was very good, both quality and taste.

That makes it a lot harder when you move out on your own, especially when you move to the city to get work. Now the water coming out of the tap is chlorinated. It’s more than enough to turn you off from water just on the smell alone. If you get it past your nose, the taste does not make it any better.

A chlorinated tap is now how to get great tasting water.

The Real Problem with Chlorine

Chlorine is a poison. Cities add it to tap water because they use surface water as their water source. Surface water collects everything that comes into it through rain or as runoff along the path to the collection point.

Where I live, the water comes from a reservoir on a dammed creek. The creek flows through chicken farms and collects everything associated with commercial chicken farms that runs off into the creek before it hits the reservoir.

The smell the last time I was at the reservoir was unbelievable. I can’t say the smell was because of the water or what was in it. I don’t know. But it did stink there.

They add chlorine to kill off anything that might be in the water. Somehow the chlorine magically stops killing when it comes out of your faucet?

Ummm….. no. It doesn’t.

Bottled Water is Better, Right?

The answer to how to get great tasting water is in a bottle, right?

Maybe not.

I found an infographic on Facebook this morning comparing tap water and bottled water. It didn’t identify the source of its information, but if the numbers are even close to true, it’s impressive.

Issues with bottled water compared to chlorinated tap waterFirst, it says tap water is tested more often and held to a higher safety standard than bottled water. When you consider that tap water is intentionally poisoned with chlorine and fluoride, that gives me some cause for concern.

A couple statistics deal with the fact that bottled water is packaged in a factory and delivered by trucks to stores. Bottled water consumes 2,000 times more energy and costs 10,000 times more than tap water and.

The infographic also says that it take 3 liters of water to product 1 liter of bottled water. I think that’s because a lot of bottled water is purified through reverse osmosis. It’s a wasteful process at best.

Factories increase the water pressure in their systems to keep the ratio of total water in to purified water out closer, like 3 liters for every 1 liter. Home RO systems can’t create as much pressure and can waste even more water for every liter of purified water.

The biggest challenge that I know of with bottled water, especially considering some of those statistics, is that you don’t know what might be in it. It’s a mystery. Then the companies package the water in cheap plastic that can leach chemicals into the water.

And not all of it tastes very good either.

How About Well Water?

As I said, I grew up out in the country. Our water came from a well and it tasted great. How do you get that wherever else you might live.

Actually, a well isn’t always the answer. The water varies from one place to the next. We had great well water when I was young. My grandparents lived right next door and their well had sulfur water.

Several years ago I lived in another house and my water came from a well. It tasted OK but it had a lot of dissolved granite in it. The mineral content wasn’t exactly ideal for great taste.

Here’s another problem with a well that most people don’t realize. When you drill a well you think about this great, untapped, unpolluted source of water. But once you drill the well, it is now tapped. Contaminated surface water can run down the side of the pipe and into your pristine well water. Check out this article on Wikipedia.

I knew a guy once who had a well and had that very problem. Somebody moved in and built something uphill from his well and his water got contaminated. He ended up chlorinating his well water to get rid of the contamination.

How to Get Great Tasting Water

So tap water, bottled water and well water are all out. What’s left?

Nothing. Those are all the sources I know of.

The solution I use is to take one of those sources and make it better with a good water filter. That’s how to get great tasting water. That’s what I do.

I have an excellent gravity water filter that gives me clean, alkaline, excellent tasting water.

You might wonder why a gravity filter instead of a whole-house system or one attached to my faucet.

That’s an excellent question.

Whole-House Water Filter

First the whole house question. My toilet and washing machine don’t need drinking-grade water. A little bit of chlorine in the bowl will actually help it stay cleaner. The same goes for the washing machine and the dishwasher.

If I had chlorine in my water then I would use a shower filter to remove it there. No need to gas myself.

Faucet Filter

Filters attached to the faucet are too small to do very much, and tend to be in the way. That’s one answer.

The other is a benefit of a stand-alone filter. It holds water. You pour water into a tank at the top of the gravity filter. The water filters through over time, about 30 minutes for ours to filter through completely, and collects in another tank at the bottom. Mine holds just under 1.5 gallons of filtered water.

If the power goes out or something happens to the water supply coming to my house, I still have some water available until they fix the problem. You don’t have that luxury with a whole-house or faucet-mounted filter.

Disclaimer: I am an affiliate for the gravity water filter that I use, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Your Thoughts

Now it’s your turn. You have my answer to how to get great tasting water. What do you think? Do you use a water filter? Or do you not drink water at all? Please let me know in a comment below.

And, as always, please share this with your followers on social media.

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6 Responses to How to Get Great Tasting Water

  1. Lydia says:

    I do not like drinking bottled water unless it is super cold and straight from the store. I can taste the plastic which makes me wonder if some of the chemicals are leaking into the water.

  2. This is a great article and getting ideas of how use gravity filters and how to de-chlorinate the water. Apart from the filters and other processes i would like to let you know that in most villages you will find wells and bore wells. Well water varies form places to places like i grew near a subtropical area and it is a village so the well water(It gets contaminated sometimes specially in rainy days) is fresh and tasty and believe me the bore well water is so sweet, rich in minerals sources.

    • Wayne says:

      I have almost always had a well, but I still filter it because as soon as you tap into the ground water from the surface you run the risk of contamination. Some places, mostly cities, don’t let you dig a well though, so your choices are limited to either chlorinated water from the tap or expensive bottled water.

  3. Hi Ben,
    I lived many places and always loved my tap water from years and years ago. But everything changed. I tried just about everything. I don’t like bottled water because I can taste the plastic. I know…people think its all in my head but I honestly do.
    The best water I like these days is reverse osmosis. I don’t have it in my home because of the tight space but eventually I can have things re-arranged.
    Right now I’m using tap water with a water filter on it. But I put a sprig of oregano in it and a piece of lemon. Hopefully that can keep me safe for the time being.
    -Donna

    • Hi Donna. I know you’re a fan of reverse osmosis, so I’m not going there.
      I will back you up on the bottled water though. You absolutely can taste the plastic, especially on a warm day. The warmer the bottle gets, the more the chemicals from the plastic leaches into the water. If you look at the recycling number on the bottom of the bottle you usually find a “1”, which is the softest, cheapest plastic.
      Thanks for the comment Donna.

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