Drinking Water Absurdities

We’ve often said, in our pool classes, that pool water is lousy to drink and drinking water is lousy for pools. But what makes the two waters so different? When tap water is thrown in the mix, we are even more confused.

On ABC’s show 20/20, in May, 2005, we find that John Stossel is at it again doing his give-me-a-break!” series. This time he’s reporting on research regarding the difference between bottled water and tap water. After explaining that water in our culture is virtually cost free, he laments about this phenomenon called “bottled drinking water”. These shiny-clear bottles are routinely purchased by most of us at more than double today’s crazy price of gasoline – as we help this multi-billion-dollar water business grow bigger every day! It just tastes better, some say, while others succumb to the claim “it’s better for you; it’s more healthy”. Even “crisp, like natural” and “pure and pristeen” were phrases used during the interviews. Tap water, on the other hand, is claimed by the packaged-water companies and their customers to be “flat”, “dull”, and even “full of germs”! One young lady said tap water tastes to her like “sewer”!

So the crew at 20/20 got busy creating a blind taste test, where New York City tap water was compared to five popular (and expensive) bottled-water samples. Folks off the street were asked to compare, and to attempt identifying the tap water among the un-labeled paper cups mostly full of the fancy bottled aqua fina. Even the bottled-water companies themselves were asked to participate; they all refused, as you might imagine.

Needless to say, the test was a flop. Or was it a great success? It’s all in the viewpoint. No one could correctly identify the tap water samples, and all but one were unable to spot any bottled brand from another. The dozen or so volunteers had all lost the psych factor of the label, the bottle style, or the temperature. They had to go on taste alone, and that sense failed them across the board.

Microbiologist Dr Aaron Margolin, of the University of New Hampshire, stated flatly that typical tap water, much like that sampled from a grubby public fountain in the middle of New York City, was bacteriologically no different at all from the many samples of bottled water in the test. Imagine – people pay 500 times more for that fancy water, with only a psychological difference between them! ‘Wouldn’t be you, would it?

BUT here’s the catch: No matter how the samples were compared, H2O ain’t H2O across our country. You pool pros know quite a bit more about water than any of the producers, sales guys or consumers of bottled water. Hardness, alkalinity, Sodium, TDS, pH and chlorine/chloramine residuals vary ten- to one-hundred fold from tap to tap so, no matter how reassuring this elaborate television test appeared to be, it is scientifically invalid in the broader sense. Pool water, from pool to pool, varies much, much less than the make-up water in the garden hose at the very same pools!

And here’s another catch. A big one. You guys who deal with old, old pools fitted with sand-and-gravel “slow-rate” filters remember alum, added by pool guys routinely to floc the suspended particulate for better entrapment. Aluminum sulfate. Aluminum. Aluminum = Alzheimer’s, some say… Well, that’s not a big deal in pool water as we swallow very little, but a heck of a big deal in the output of drinking-water filtration plants. Using aluminum compounds to help filter the finest particulate will leave behind even finer ions which can affect taste, maybe, and healthfulness, plenty. Check with your local treatment plant. If they still use alum, maybe those five-gallon water jugs aren’t so expensive after all…

Now back to pools. Pool water – say at a low 7s pH, with a total alkalinity of 100ish, calcium hardness at multiple hundreds of ppm, a swimmable temperature and with a TDS of a couple thousand ppm – tastes pretty much the same around the world. Sensitive folks can tell if there’s a fair amount of chloramine present, but almost no one can spot a sanitary trace of free chlorine. Much matured or “old” water with a high TDS (mostly sodium chloride, common salt) is easier to identify by your swimmers – probably the only factor routinely identified by the swim team as funny tasting or salty tasting water. All of this, while tap water varies, chemically, to an extreme from town to town… Yes, and all of that, while tap-water’s taste actually changes very, very little at all.

John Stossel’s barely scientific test remains valid none the less, if only because of the above asserted lack of significant variation between most all water types. So love your tap water and skip the expensive stuff. John says you’re just buying the hype… But in your pool, with your fancy test kit and your reasonable chemicals, you are buying good oxidation, great sanitation, your pool’s longevity, and – yes – some pretty good taste too.

~ kw