What problems are in your water? At Home Water Systems, conditioning water is our specialty. After a FREE “in home” water analysis, our Home Water Systems technicians can recommend the appropriate equipment to meet all your water treatment needs.
Your Water and You
Water plays a huge role in our everyday lives. We can live for weeks without food but only days without water. We bathe in it, brush our teeth with it, wash our clothes with it and clean our dishes with it. We swim in water and sprinkle our lawns with it. We wash our cars, trucks, vans, bikes and boats with water. We drink it, cook with it, make orange juice with it and mix baby formula with it. Industries use water in manufacturing processes. As a matter of fact, there’s a little water in just about everything.
But more importantly, there’s water in you. Between 55 and 65 percent of the human body is made up of water! That means if you took all of the water out of a 175-pound man, he would weigh a mere 70 pounds! And the younger you are, the more water your body contains.
Determining the Quality of Your Water
There are a number of problems that can affect the quality of the water you drink. Surprisingly, some contaminated water can look clean and clear at a glance. But just because water looks good, doesn’t mean that it is.
The only way to be certain what’s in your water is to have it tested. Water treatment professionals can perform tests, direct your water sample to certified laboratories and help you decipher the results. If you are supplied with water by a local water utility, you can request the results they’ve recorded from government mandated tests for a variety of contaminants.
While bad odors, unusual colors or metallic tastes usually indicate a drinking water problem, some go undetected. Lead is tasteless, odorless, and colorless and can find its way into your water via soldered pipe connections. Lead-based solder is still being used.
Remember Murphy’s Law on Water …. if its possible to get in the water, it will!
Even though cities generally use chlorine to disinfect water to prevent illness and disease, chlorination is not a foolproof disinfection method. Unexpected outbreaks of certain microorganisms can still occur. Cryptosporidium (Beaver Fever), a waterborne parasite, caused several hundred thousand people to become ill in Milwaukee in April, 1993. Although it’s disinfected, city water may encounter contaminants once it leaves the treatment plant and travels through miles of distribution lines before it reaches your home.
Healthy Water Report
Many factors can influence our health from our family history to our social, physical and economic environment to our own individual coping skills. Some of these factors are, to varying degrees within our control, but one area where people can influence their health positively is through their own personal health practices.
In most cases, Canadians enjoy reasonably high quality drinking water, but clean water at the source may be contaminated by the time it flows out of consumers’ taps or water filters. On its journey to, and through, your home, drinking water comes into contact with a large number of materials, including additives, pumps, pipes, holding tanks, fittings and faucets. These products are all made from different materials of varying quality.
In Canada, over four million people depend on private wells for their drinking water. In addition, lakes, rivers and other sources of surface water often serve as the sole water supply for cottagers, campers, boaters and hikers. Unlike municipal water systems, these water supplies may not be subjected to routine testing for microbiological contamination or to appropriate disinfection procedures.
Microbiological contamination is the primary cause of disease outbreaks associated with drinking water. Between 1974 and 1996, over 160 waterborne disease outbreaks involving some 8000 people were reported in Canada. It is estimated that only 10 per cent of all waterborne outbreaks occurring in Canada are ever reported.
