Many experts now agree that if you live in an area on a municipal water system, then there is little you need to be worried about. Canada has some of the best water and testing practices in the world and the only real concern is Chlorination by products. Chlorination byproducts are chemicals that result from the reaction of chlorine with organic substances in water. In areas with high TDS events or older water delivery systems, larger amounts of chlorine are required to provide acceptable deactivation levels of pathogens in the water. This greater amount of added chlorine then reacts with the organics in the water and on the pipe walls which react to for these disinfection by-products. Trihalomethanes (THMs) refer to one class of disinfection by-products found in nearly every chlorinated public water supply to some extent. The most prevalent is chloroform (trichloromethane), a THM which is carcinogenic to rats and mice. The principle method for removal of chlorination by-products like chloroform is by activated carbon adsorption. So what is generally recommended, and what I do is run all my drinking water through an activated carbon filter (Brita, undersink, refridgerator). I drink exclusivly Calgary/Vancouver tapwater filtered through carbon and feel that it is the best for me and my family as well as the Environment.

PS Brita Filters can be recycled. Google it!:biggrin:

Most municipalities publish their water quality reports online. If not, they are available upon request and are easily assesed for acceptability. TDS alone is not a good indicator of the overall water quality or "safeness to drink." There is no evidence that drinking hard water opposed to soft water has any effect on the body as far as I'm aware. If you are really concerned, find your local water quality report and post a link or PM it to me or just compare it to health canada's guidlines, or the EPA's.

This is what I have been told on drinking pure water:
Drinking tap or filtered water, does not have any direct impact on your mineral/vitamin uptake unless you are drinking good "mineral water". Even then intake is minimal, plus most people do not use mineral waters as any kind of significant nutrient uptake anyways. So drinking really pure water would only have an effect on your body at the excessive side of the scale. Pure water will make water intoxication, or Hyponatremia develop faster.
http://chemistry.about.com/cs/5/f/blwaterintox.htm

P.S.
RO/DI coffee IMO tastes way better.
and i'm not sure on this, but in my mind since your drinking water is also powering your bodies waste filtering systems that the purest water will help it work better. I.E. ~1 TDS can absorb more toxins then +100 TDS water.

I'm not a fan of city water...Personally I can't wait to finally set up my RODI system with the drinking kit(finally ordered parts from BWI today). I'm just going to bypass my di filter with some ball valves for drinking.
Cheers

St albert has edmonton tap water and the TDS is around 200

That sounds like a really cool fish for the reef. Where can I get one :lol:

True but maybe not true too :biggrin: You have to also look at the levels of things like chloroform in the water. Simply having some present is not necessarily dangerous. You have to ask how much is there in the water? How much is then absorbed by your digestive tract? How much is then inactivated by first pass metabolism in your liver? How quickly is it excreted by your kidneys? And of course how much was required to give rats cancer? Cholorform is fairly volatile too so if you use a Brita for example and then have the water sitting in the Brita in the fridge a good portion of any chloroform would probably evaporate out of the water. Toxicology is complicated and you can't simply say there is some chloroform in our drinking water and it will cause cancer.

I still think you would have to drink a heck of alot of RO/DI water to suffer water intoxication. As for helping your bodies waste filtering I have to say probably not. Once the water is absorbed it goes into your blood where it basically mixes with all the minerals /proteins etc. in your blood anyhow. It is the blood that is then filtered by liver and kidneys etc. Drinking RO/DI water will not affect your blood chemistry or composition so would not have any effect on your bodies ability to remove waste or toxins.

Very True. I did not mean to say that you will DEFINITLY get cancer from not filtering your drinking water. I only wanted to convey that I believe that dinking tap water is perfectly safe and the only thing that I protect against is chlorination by-products. The levels of which are 99% of the time way below acceptable levels and in some cases not even detectable. But as we are not apprised of the amounts of chlorine being introduced into our water on a daily basis, periods with elevated levels of organics in the water supply require higher concentrations of Chlorine to be added to achieve acceptable levels of disinfection. This CAN cause the THM levels in our water supply to increase. It is a very complex issue and there is a wealth of good and even more bad information out there on drinking water safety. Here's a link if you want to learn everything you could ever want to know.:biggrin: Take things for what they are worth and do your own research from reputable sources before you believe something some anonymous person tells you on some website!:wink:

http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/ewh-semt/pubs.../index-eng.php

I was just thinking that if your tap water is say 200 PPM, then chances are at least some of that 200 PPM is something you would rather not have going into your body and your body is going to have to work harder to remove it. I was thinking higher TDS is just hindering your waste filters. I doubt it would have any significant effect, but hey who knows. Over a lifetime it could have some effect.

Fair enough. Just wanted to point out that it is a complicated thing. People tend to react to stuff without really knowing the bigger picture. Kind of like the debate we had about mercury in vaccines etc. the best idea is to ask somebody with expertise in toxicoloy. Hey, do we know one of those :biggrin:

It is, unfortunately, more complicated then that. TDS meters are really conductivity meters that give a surrogate measurement of TDS, not actual "real" TDS. The TDS meters are measuring the amount of dissolved ions which probably has a good correlation with real TDS. But TDS meters will not measure non charged contaminants in the water such as many organic compounds, pesticides etc. The levels of toxic materials you would be worried about in drinking water most likely have no direct correlation to TDS as read by our TDS meters which is more a product of the source of water and how hard the water is. You would probably have to go to your local water quality reports for more detailed information as was pointed out by another member.

I just TDSed the beer I am drinking and my tap water. BEER; 134, my tap water 236. I told the wife beer was better for me. I will stick with my beer:mrgreen: