Well water is fantastic. I can notice the difference city to city and have since switched to certain types of bottled water. Making ice cubes with bottled water makes drinks taste differently.
If you want to avoid the cost and trash of bottled water, try keeping a pitcher of water(or reusable water bottles filled from the tap) in your fridge. The chlorine is pretty volatile, and will evaporate off within a day(assuming the pitcher isn't air tight). Just have some rotating stock so you can always have water ready to drink or make ice cubes. Of course you could also go the filtration route, but that adds the upfront cost of the system, and continuous cost of filters and wasted water.
It depends on the treatment method your city uses. Chlorine gas will evaporate out, but chloramine won't, and will also react with a lot of things downstream to make nasty tasting organics, for example if you use the water in brewing.
And can depend on where in a city you are. And sometimes the different treatment systems are still mained to eachother so shifting demand and supply can change which water you’re drinking from.
Huh, I always heard this as "a few hours" and assumed it was about getting the right temperature.
(And from my darkroom days, I'm fairly good at nailing 20 °C with my fingers, so I just waited for the tap to give me the right temperature and then poured it straight into the pots.)
As someone who grew up with well water, it tasted fine, but (at least for me based on local conditions), it was a huge pain in the ass.
Low pressure, extremely hard to the point where soap is useless and we had to replace things regularly from scale build up, the UV filter thing we had to run in the basement, the worry that one day you could randomly lose the prime on the pump and they'd have to dig to get it back (which happened once), no fluoride so my teeth aren't the best.
Give me that carbon filtered (removes the chlorine taste) city water any day :)
Local conditions and probably equipment will make a difference in pressure. My well kicks on around 35 psi and off around 65, if I'm remembering right. Of course, it failed in the past year, no digging required, but it did take the better part of a day to pull up the old one, and attach a new one and lower it down. Plus one day of troubleshooting and a day of waiting for the pump to arrive didn't make a fun few days.
I've been living in a place with a softener on a well for a while now. Many people have asked about salty water, but I don't find it to be an issue at all. I even prefer water from our softened tap over the unsoftened one. I don't notice rings or residue in my drinking glasses.
I think a common misconception is that your water runs through the salt. In reality, the water runs through a filter and the salt water is used to periodically flush the accumulated metals out of the filter. This could lead to some residual salt, but it will get flushed away quickly. The other source of salty water is a busted valve. Replace it and the water will be fine again.
Potassium chloride water softening salt is more expensive, but unless you use way more water than we do, I don't find it to be an unreasonable expense.
...the worry that one day you could randomly lose the prime on the pump and they'd have to dig to get it back (which happened once)...
Where was this? Pumps are placed at the bottom of wells and avoid this problem entirely. It's physically impossible for a pump placed at the top to raise water more than 10m.
I'll second a reverse osmosis filter. We filter municipal water through one to get drinking water and, honestly, we're very happy with it. It's not as good as, you know, Swiss mountain water, but it's pretty close.
Do you have a recommendation for a countertop distilling machine? A back of the napkin calculation shows that it would be 50% cheaper for me to pay for the electricity and distill water myself than buy bottled water, but the idea had never occurred to me.
While not as good as distilling can I suggest filtering like the rain fresh system uses. I have used them for decades because well water has too much minerals (bad tasting) in this part of Ontario.
Seattle has fantastic city water. Most months of the year, Oakland water is very good (offer not valid for all combinations of reservoir and pipes, your mileage may vary).
Also, if you got used to something like iron or calcium enrichment, you might just not like those vintages, even if they're "objectively" good.
Oppositely, I've lived in Toronto for quite a long time, but my family all live in rural Ontario. A bunch of years ago my parents finally got over the fear factor and came to the city to visit.
My dad commented specifically that he was impressed at the taste of our tap water, and thought it was an unexpected highlight of the trip.
We grew up on well water. Although by this point they were living "in town" so it is possible that their water has more chlorine, etc, than Toronto's. When I visit them, their tap water tastes dull (but not bad) to me, so there is that.
The tap water where I live in Canada is fantastic. But when I'm served filtered water with tap water ice cubes I can tell the difference pretty easily.
