Water Not Pure

Are you drinking contaminated water?

There are a couple of ways to found what types of contaminants are present in your supply and in your home. If you are serviced by a public treatment facility in the US, they are required to publish a quality report, sometimes referred to as a Customer Confidence Report, on an annual basis. The reports do not always inspire confidence.

If you have a private well or have older pipes, it is sometimes a good idea to have a sample tested. In homes with older pipes, there are sometimes traces of lead that would not show up on the quality report, because they are not present at the facility.

Many Kinds of Contaminants

There are hundreds of different contaminants that could be present in a private well. Testing for all of them is expensive. Sometimes, you can get information from your local government offices concerning which contaminants to test for. That can reduce the cost of testing.

A simple litmus paper test will reveal one type of contaminated tap water. If chlorine is present, the paper will change colors. The test strips are very inexpensive, used primarily for testing the amount of chlorine in pools. They are available at any hardware store. So, if you are curious, you could buy some.