Cleaning up the water in my home

In my pursuit of improving my life, one of my goals has been to improve the quality of my home. This includes making sure the house is safe and limiting the amount of indoor pollutants. Water plays a big part in that. For years, I've used a filter for drinking water. But a New York Times article published almost a year ago, made me think that maybe I needed to do more.

Regulators have been neglecting the enforcement of clean water laws, according to the article. So what to do? Well, I wasn't sure, so I procrastinated. Then, about a month ago, we got our drinking water quality report. The water quality report lists a number of substances that are checked for. It also lists the level of each substance, the range detected and if the levels are in compliance.

The substances I looked at were lead, nitrate, nitrite, and E. coli. I was happy to see that everything was in compliance. Most people should get a similar report, but if you can't get one, you can also call your municipal district and ask for one. Another place to get information is the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Safe Drinking Water Information System. Here, you can search for violations.

Another source of information is water testing kits. These kits can test for various chemicals and are pretty easy to use, so I've heard. I have actually not used one of these tests yet. (Like I said, the article came out a year ago and I'm just now looking into the water in my own area.)

After you have this wealth of information, what should you do? Like I said, our water is under compliance, but it's not perfect. For example for lead, our value was .0039 mg/L. It needs to be under 0.015 mg/L. So like I said, the water's not bad, but it's not perfect. For our drinking water, our fridge has a filter in it, which needs to be changed every 6 months. We're pretty happy with it; I can taste the difference from the purified water and the tap water.

Next on my to-do list is to get filtered show heads. Especially since my three year old still tries to drink bathwater. I've seen some at the home improvement store that can be used as a hand held shower, which is good for us because I could use that to bathe the little one as well.

The other option is a home filtration system. While there are certainly many pros such as having fewer filters to buy, there are two major reasons I decided against getting one of these. One is a high up-front cost. The other is that the water has to go through the pipes in your house after being filtered. If you have corrosive pipes, those sediments are still getting in your water. I'll give an update once the filters are installed.