The bottled water business is booming and companies that are producing bottled water do fuel the fear of people that the water at their homes is not that good for drinking or that they are going to sell them something that is much better for them. Is the tap water that is coming out of your sink that bad and not suitable for drinking? There is a relatively easy and not very expensive way to actually check and confirm the quality of the water and see for yourself if you should be drinking it or it is really not good for that. Let me tell and show you how you can do that yourself at home...

What is Pure Water

Pure or clean water or H2O is essentially water with nothing else inside it. There are no additional minerals or other elements dissolved in it like in bottled mineral water for example. Essentially clean or pure water is what distilled water is, however you will most likely not be able buy distilled water as bottled water for drinking (it is normally being sold for other different purposes). Bottled water is normally not pure water, it is either everyday drinking water that has been filtered or a mineral water that contains higher amount of dissolved minerals that are apparently needed by our bodies and the water can be a source of some of the daily requirements. There are also some variations like spring water for example that normally is not so high in mineral contents like mineral water, but is still considered better than regular filtered drinking water.

So what is the water that comes from out sink at home then? Normally it should be water that has been filtered and cleaned from harmful things that you should not be drinking. That is the ideal case, however it is not uncommon to find places where the tap water is not well filtered and delivered in great condition for people to use. There can be many different causes for water to be contaminated and not suitable for drinking indeed, but these are usually rare to find nowadays at least in the developed world. That is precisely why you should just give a quick test of your water at home to be sure that it is good enough for drinking if you are worried that it may not be. Even if it turns out not to be the best quality for drinking, you can install an inexpensive reverse osmosis filtration system that can produce good quality drinking water instead of going for overhyped and expensive bottled water that is good for you.

Simplex Health Complete Water Quality Test Kit

I'll be using one of the more complex tests from Simplex Health that tests water for 13 different parameters. This kit allows you to find a possible issue in your water that may not necessarily be caused by the water supply company, it could be due to bad plumbing or something else. The kit contains tests for: coliform bacteria, nitrate, nitrite, hydrogen sulfide, total hardness, total alkalinity, total chlorine, free chlorine, chloride, copper, sulfate, iron and pH level of the water. All of the tests besides the one for presence of bacteria take up just a few minutes to do, the one for coliform bacteria will need 24/48 hours before you can read the results.

This kit allows you to relatively quickly and easily check the quality of your water without you having to be an expert in water contaminations and quality checks. It contains two sets of every test besides the one for bacteria, so you can also use it to test what kind of water comes from your home filtration system (if you have one available). You could also test to compare with bottled water for example, though there you will most likely not find any issues with the water. Still such a comparison can be good way to see how much "better" the bottled water you may be drinking is.

Time to do Some Testing

The first 12 tests took less than 30 minutes to complete following the instructions and according to the results there was nothing wrong with my tap water at home (I already knew that). The pH test of the water did return weird results, though there was a warning that it may not be correct with low alkalinity water and it seems that was the case, so I did it again with a more precise method. More about that in a moment though as I was sure that the tap water was not acidic like 5 pH for sure as the test strip was suggesting. Only the Chloride test did not go properly apparently as the color of the test strip did not turn in any of the shown on the results chart, not sure why (that may need some extra checking). Also as I already knew there was some Free Chlorine in the water as they use it to make it safe for drinking, the presence of free chlorine in drinking water is a direct result of the absence of bacteria.

The Bacteria Test intended to find a presence of Coliform bacteria as well as to aid in E.coli detection did not return any positive results, so no bacteria present in my tap water either... not that I did expect to find any. This test however did require a longer time as it needs 24 to 48 hours to complete before reading the results (depending on the ambient temperature). So while waiting for the detection of bacteria in my tap water I went on to do other stuff and also to test properly the level of pH of the water with a pH meter.

The Simplex Health water quality test kit I've used did pretty good with 11 out of 13 tests that had no problems completing and showing correct results, the pH and Chloride one did produce strange results. This was of course not a sign that there is something wrong with the tap water in the particular case, things like that can happen when using test strips to test things. This is precisely why it is good to have a spare to repeat the test and this kit does come with two pairs of each test strip. The pH test was pointless to repeat as it probably would still give the same lower pH level and I was planning to test it properly anyway (Phenol red is your best friend if you don't have a digital pH meter). The other test for Chloride did produce the same strange result, so I can only assume that it was something wrong with the test strips.

A Bit More Professional Testing

Ok, so every health geek should have a pH meter handy, right? Well I don't consider myself as such, but I actually do have a decent pH meter available and by decent I mean one that actually can be calibrated with proper buffer solutions in order to provide you with really accurate results should you need such of course. As you could see from the results chart for the test strips it is in quite big steps regarding pH values thus not very accurate, and in my case not accurate at all.

So what about the pH of my tap water, well it turns out it is about 7.48 pH or a bit above the neutral level of 7 pH, meaning that it is slightly more alkaline. Nowhere near the alarmingly acid level of about 5 pH that the test strip was showing, as expected. Normally tap water should be treated so that it will be around the neutral level of 7 pH (usually slightly higher), but if there is something wrong with the water treatment facility or the plumbing or something else it might be deviating more. It may become alarming especially if it gets too acid or too alkaline moving with more than 1 pH unit from the 7, so everything with the pH of the water was fine.

Now, one would normally ask why I still have a water filtration system when my tap water is apparently fine... there are reasons for that as well, but I'll be talking about that another time. This post was just intended to show you that you can easily check the quality of your tap water and see if there is something that you should be worried about or not. In most cases this is just for you to get rest assured that there is nothing wrong with your tap water, though in some cases if you has reasons to doubt the quality you can use a test like that one to confirm your suspicions and then you would need to send a probe of the water for proper testing if the test confirms that there might be something wrong indeed. Do note that a possible cause for worry may not necessarily be caused by the water treatment plans supplying your tap water, it could be due to something else along the way water travels to get to your home,

If you have a question or want to add something, then please leave a comment below.

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