Are you able to safely drink water from your own tap or do you drink and cook only with bottled water bought in a store?

I live in Oregon. I can see the snow my drinking water comes from.

edit :: and I drink from the tap. Our water is lovely.

You are a lucky man. In L.A. you don’t drink much water from a tap if you can help it.

I feel your pain. From 13 to 15 I lived in Redlands. The water was horrific.

I can, I live in the East Bay in Northern California, our water is pretty good and it’s clean, and from the Sierra.

We have a very complicated filtration system in the well house because our well has some arsenic in it. We shower in the water and have a point of use reverse osmosis unit in the kitchen which removes the last trace of arsenic to make it safe to drink.

When I wash myself, sometimes I drink tap water by accident. But I never consider it a big deal. Tap water isn’t as tasty as bottled water though.

What? I can still eat snow around here. I feel bad for forced filters and boil orders.

I can drink tap water and not get sick…but sometimes, too often in fact, it has weird tastes. That’s right, the water here has had several different tastes. Once it was all greasy and oily for a day…like ass sewage. I washed the dishes and thought that there was something real greasy I cleaned…but no, after the dishes, the water was still all buggered up. The icky feel stayed on my hands for hours…and I couldn’t really wash them.

When I was living down in Meigs County, Ohio (home of some of the finest skunk bud on earth) the water was full of sulfur. That’s right, it smelled just like…well, rotten eggs. I didn’t like to drink it.
But then I learned that people paid good money to soak in sulfur hot springs, so I didn’t feel too bad bathing in the shit.

My landlord is a slum lord, and we have a shallow well.

If you poured a glass of water from my tap and let it sit, the glass would have a film of some strange hairy orange substance after an hour or so.

I soak my shower head in Lysol Power toilet bowl cleaner once a week, just to keep the water coming out. We’ve lived here two years and have had to replace the rings in the tub faucet three times.

My dog smells the tap water and runs away.

We buy our water by the gallon at a 20 cents-per-gallon machine outside the grocery store.

I want to slap people who complain about chlorine and fluoride.

I cook with tap water everywhere I have ever lived. Straight from the tap no filter. In FL I usually filter my water with Brita or a fridge filter before drinking it, because FL water tastes terrible. However, I do sometimes drink tap water at restaurants and I have no idea if it is filtered. So etimes it tastes bad enough I can guess. In fact I drink tap water almost always in restaurants around the country (USA). Some places like Starbucks filter their water so it tastes great. An employee once told me it is triple filtered.

From what I understand most home filters don’t rid the water of bacteria, but rather help filter out the chemicals used in public water systems that kill the bacteria.

I almost never drink bottled water. I drink it in lieu of a soda sometimes from a vending machine, that sort of thing. I also bring bottled water along on long car trips. Long is over 2 hours. Or, if I know I will be out in extreme heat without easy access to a drink I bring along bottled water. It’s rare though. If I am coming from my house I just use Brita water in my own “bottle.” I often don’t have any bottled water in my house. During the summer I am more likely to have some as a safety for storms that come through. I also buy it for racing trips (my husband races as a hobby) and leftovers go into our fridge.

The water here is pristine. Sierra snow melt. The problem for a while was the antiquated pipes and mains locally.

The quality of the tap water here is very good. It comes from Loch Katrine.

Tap water is fine here. I avoid buying bottled water. I just fill bottles from the tap.

I’ve been drinking tap water for over 40 years and every child of mine came out with ten fingers and ten toes.

My tap water is fair, a little hard with some iron, so I get 5 gallon jugs of spring water from a local supplier. They take back the jugs and reuse them and I use a water bottle, so no waste. The municipal water here in the city is cow piss. And I’ve been hit with a lot of cow’s tails, so I know what the taste is. I tried refilling my water bottle once and almost spit it out. It is vile.

Relevant

We have fantastic water. Town water comes from the Finger Lakes. In addition we have our own deep well which has been tested and is perfect.

The house I grew up in had a well that was supplied by a rather large artesian aqufier (with great-tasting water). Some farms in the area, outside the area of the aquifer, had wells with sulfur water, and it was called egg-water because it smelled like bad eggs.

My tap water is some of the best tap water I’ve tasted in the US.

Where I live, the water is fine to drink and cook with. I almost never drink bottled water unless I’m out.

I find my well water delicious; it is hard and does etch glass and the enamel surfaces on my bath tub when I leave it filled during the winter for a water supply if the power goes out.

I take a bottle of chilled or iced tap water with me when I go out.

My water comes from Lake Lanier, which is a large reservoir in NE Georgia. It is fed by the Chattahoochee River, which in turn is supplied by any number of rivers and streams.

My county does a pretty good job of filtering wastewater and cleaning it and re-feeding the downstream.

I’m happy with my water.

@Judi Thanks, that is a cool movie. I have a high school friend whom I contacted some years ago. He told me his new job is bottling and selling water. He laughed and asked if I could guess where he gets his sparkling clear water to bottle. I said from an underground stream? He laughed once more and said, no, from the tap.
This is why I have two of the topics for this question side
by side “Evian” and spelled backwards “Naive.”

Tap water here is known for being high quality (comes from the Hetch Hetchy), so I can pretty much do whatever I want with it.

My tap water here isn’t bad, other towns I’ve lived in added way too much chlorine; I’ve never lived under a boil water advisory, even after Hurricane Sandy. The landlord, installed an under-sink filter, and we had Brita pitchers from our previous homes, so we double filter the drinking and coffee water, and single filter the cooking water.

Tap water is still good were I live (south England)

Here (Germany), it’s fine.

@Leanne1986 Jealous. I love the south of England.

@longgone I love what I have seen of Germany! Spent quite a bit of time in Hildesheim as a child.

I’m up for a swap! :]