Water, Water Everywhere – Is there a Clean Drop to Drink?

When it comes to water, which makes up something like 62% of the human body, I do believe that quality matters. If you are what you eat, then you definitely are what you drink. Without water, we can’t survive. At the same time, I’m very picky about the water that I drink. If 2/3 of my body is going to be made up of something, I want it to be something good. I may be something of a water snob. I won’t drink plain tap water at home (although I do drink it at restaurants….no way am I paying $3.00 for a bottle of water.) I’m a fan of filtered, bottled (from some brands) and distilled water. I’m familiar with the arguments against bottled water – cost, environmental impact, etc. But these things alone weren’t enough to get me to start drinking tap water.

One day, I stumbled across an article that mentioned that talked about Aquafina bottled water. As it turns out, back in 2007, both Aquafina and Dasani bottled waters were actually bottled water from the public water sources. So at that point, everyone who was buying Aquafina or Dasani were actually paying to drink their tap water from bottles. Now THAT impacted me. Maybe not the desired effect of others, but I promptly stopped drinking either of those brands of water and switched to Deer Park, which gets its water from springs in the “eastern United States, including Maryland, Pennsylvania and Florida.”

Then, the other day I recalled the story about the girl who went around her town in Florida testing water samples from ice machines only to discover that toilets had cleaner drinking water than the ice machines. Once I remembered that, I decided that I need to take the issue of clean water into my own hands. Clearly I couldn’t trust the brands and the big corporate giants to give me the real scoop. So I hopped online in search of a home water testing kit so I could put the waters in my life to the test. I quickly found the perfect solution with the Watersafe Science Project 10-Pack. I contacted Discover Testing and they graciously offered me a kit to use for my “research.” A few days later the kit was opened and on my table, ready to start analyzing my water samples.

The kit included everything I would need to test for 8 common contaminants of water, including bacteria, lead, pesticides, nitrate, nitrite, cholorine, pH and hardness. To test for bacteria, you simply filled the Bacteria Test vial with water to the fill line, shake and let rest for 48 hours. Purple is good, Yellow is bad. For the Lead and pesticide tests, they provided a test vial, dropper pipette, and two Watersafe test strips. To perform those tests, I just added two droppers of water into the vial, and then placed the test strips into the water for 10 minutes. Two blue lines showed up on each strip and the darkness of the lines indicated positive or negative results. For nitrate/nitrite, pH, hardness, and chlorine, I simply dunked the test strips into water and waited for 15 seconds for the reagent pads to change colors. Then I matched the results to a nifty color chart that was included in my kit.

I tested water from the District of Columbia, Maryland, Virginia, and various bottled water brands. The results were somewhat surprising….

Before you get overwhelmed by all the data in these charts, let me give a breakdown of the “lowlights.” The DC water, Deer Park Spring water, Aquafina, and Dasani water all tested POSITIVE for pesticides in my mind. Now one could argue that they were false positives because the way that you determined whether it was positive was based on whether or not two blue strips were the same color or if one was darker. All of the ones I listed as positive were so close that it could’ve gone either way, and in my mind that’s too close for comfort. When I told our office manager about my test results, he promptly switched out all of the water filters in our office. Whether those filters remove pesticides, I have no clue, but since I drink a lot of water at work, I’m hoping they do. I’ve now also added Deer Park Spring water to my list of bottled waters that I don’t drink.

For water hardness, the DC Filtered water, MD Brita filtered water and the VA tap water all tested out of spec. When I looked up what exactly water hardness was, it looks like it’s measuring the presence of minerals in the water. There don’t appear to be any positive or negative health benefits associated with water hardness, so other than making it easier to wash off soap, I don’t think water hardness matters to me that much.

Both DC and Virgina had high pH levels, but were within the 6.5 to 8.5 limits as well. According to the USGS, “Excessively high and low pHs can be detrimental for the use of water. High pH causes a bitter taste, water pipes and water-using appliances become encrusted with depoisits, and it depresses the effectiveness of the disinfection of chlorine, thereby causing the need for additional chlorine when pH is high. Low-pH water will corrode or dissolve metals and other substances. Pollution can change a water’s pH, which in turn can harm animals and plants living in the water.”

You’ll also notice that a few test results are missing from the MD charts, and that’s because I left my test strips out to dry for too long and I wasn’t able to read the colors accurately.

If anything, being able to test the water samples with the WaterSafe kit showed me that all waters are not created equal. Even bottled waters may have things lurking inside, floating around with our hydrogen ions. Everyone’s water is different and it comes from different sources. Just for your own knowledge or for curiosity’s sake, I recommend doing one of these easy home water tests for yourself. Discover Testing has a great collection of Home Drinking Water Tests that you can purchase online. If you have a child who is of science project age, I think the WaterSafe Science Project 10-pack is easy to use and would be great fun for kids to use for a science fair – collecting toilet samples, stream samples, rain run off, etc.

A big thank you to Discover Testing for allowing me to use their kit to test my water. Happy drinking everyone! Glug, glug.

Disclaimer: This post consists of my (and/or fellow tester) opinions only. No compensation was given for this review/giveaway. I requested and received a free WaterSafe Science Project 10-pack courtesy of Discover Testing for the purposes of writing this review. This did not affect the outcome of this review.

Photo provided through Creative Commons from shrff14.