Asklemmy

Canada here - I drink water straight from the tap.

Although Canadian tap water is some of the highest quality tap water in the world.

Canada - Many people here put water in the fridge or a britta jug to get rid of the chlorine taste

Your examples, yes, but I also dont know of any European country where you need to boil the water you drink.

US, Colorado - no need to filter or boil the tap water here. One of the benefits of living at the base of the mountains I suppose

Asian that’s moved to the U.K. here.

Back home, when I grew up I’ve never drank tap water. In my college days I was way too lazy and started just drinking it with a cheap filter. Surprisingly I survived for 5 years despite everyone around me telling me otherwise.

Now in the U.K. I’ve always drank straight from the tap. It’s surprisingly refreshing! And the boiled water taste I can’t really get used to again when I visit home.

The water in Iceland is safe to drink from the tap. Although if I recall correctly it’s pretty sulfuric due to the local hot springs.

I’ve visited a few countries around Europe and have always enjoyed sampling their local tap.

At home I exclusively drink tap water. I only boil it for tea sometimes :) I‘m from Germany.

Irish person here. Yes, I drink my tap water without boiling. My water comes from a well as I live in a rural area, but town/city water is drinkable too.

I live in Philadelphia and I always boil and filter my tap water. My mother did it when we grew up in New York, then my brother and I continued the practice.

I live in Seattle WA in usa. We have some of the cleanest water. This is because of the great fire of 1889. An entire district and most of the waterfront went up in flames. The reason is that the fire department had no water pressure because of all the demand from the attempt to put out the fire.

After that they got the cedar river shed. A huge amount of land that is owned by Seattle and kept pristine.

So yes you can drink the tap water in Seattle.

But I only drink la croix, lol

UK, yes - but cold water only and even then the taste of tap water, though not indicative of anything dangerous, is weird enough for me to consider buying a purifier.

It used to be the case that Brits would have a separate hot water tank in which you were told not to drink out of that at all, but modern homes just have the water go through a boiler nowadays. Tom Scott has a good video on that.

Drinkable in NZ but they add fluoride. It tastes much better through a filter

If its brown gulp it down, if its black send it back

The tap water is perfectly drinkable in my city but I was raised to drink boiled water coming from a Chinese family. Water straight from the tap tastes disgusting to me.

I'm in the US. When I was kid playing outside we would drink the water straight out of the garden hose. (Yeah I know that's the same as "the tap"). Now days, we have a filter on the water dispenser built into the refrigerator. So water and ice goes through activated charcoal to remove anything that could be in it.

Bermuda here, straight from the tap!

It actually gets collected from rain water on each individual home's roof. The roofs are lime-washed to kill the really nasty stuff as it runs down in to a holding tank under the house. Some times you get dead critters in there, but nothing larger than a small lizard or bug. They tend to sink to the bottom of the tank, below the outlets.

Most Bermudians swear by a "cup of bleach" thrown down there every couple of years. It's in to a tank that's 10,000gal+ at a minimum (mine's over 40,000), so it's basically homeopathy at that point - but the lime-wash works!

The only place you'll want to avoid it in Bermuda is in the City of Hamilton (mains, not great quality), a house with a dirty roof, or in one near the sole power station on the island. This is an on-going fight to get them to adhere to the emissions safety standards they claim to.

White roofs and smoke stack in the picture!

In this US, yes, we generally trust our tap water (although there have been notable incidents of water infrastructure failures, such as major lead contamination in Flint, MI), to the extent that if you get a drink in a restaurant here, 99% of the time it's going to be mixed or made using tap water, with ice made from tap water.

Some folks will use a filter (Brita brand filter pitchers used to be popular at one time, with TV ads and everything) but that's more for filtering out chemicals/toxins/minerals than anything else.

In rural places, every now and then the local government or water company (yes, a lot of places here have privatized water infrastructure which is not super great) will put out a 'Boil Water Notice' but this is generally considered outside of the norm, and you usually expect to see that kind of stuff resolve within a couple of days unless it's a result of a major disaster (we were under a Boil Water notice for 2 weeks after hurricane Katrina in my area, the longest stretch I ever remember). Boil Water notices are usually a result of either a breach of the infrascture (a pipe collapsing and the water supply getting dirty), or a water supply failing its regular quality/safety tests. Our water (can't speak for everywhere in the US, and don't really know the specifics of how they do it) is chemically treated and filtered before it goes into the tap, and the supply mechanisms are usually regularly tested to make sure they're within safe standards.

All of that being said, I know people who refuse to drink tap water, mostly because it tends to have a distinct taste from treatment and from having minerals in it, but also because they've heard horror stories like in Flint. Two things: those folks normally drink bottled water, which is usually just bottled-up tap water from some other place; and I usually see those folks gladly drinking fountain drinks/tea/etc at a restaurant, which is made with un-boiled tap water and served on tap-ice.

TL;DR - the tap water in the US is generally considered safe to drink, in most places, with notable exceptions, and for now (our mostly-privatized infrastructure is getting worse and worse, and very public failures have started to appear in not only water infrastructure, but everywhere)

After moving to the city I have to buy cannister water, because regular water is chlorated, not even ozonated, it tastes awful and not healthy.

I remember once after a long absence (1+ year) in my district, tap water literally felt sweet.

Have always drank tap water. No issue.

• New Jersey 🇺🇸
• Ontario 🇨🇦
• Tokyo 🇯🇵

Yep, I've lived in Japan, Canada and Australia and had no issues with tap water in any of them. (Although in Canada I do filter it, as in my specific area and the age of the house there is potential issues with lead pipes and acidic water.) When I've been travelling I've drank tap water across a lot of Europe with no issues.

You'll be fine in Iceland.

Here in Estonia tap water is great everywhere. Like my parents have a well at their farm connected to their plumbing and it's the best water I have ever had. The capital has water that tastes kinda like drinking pool water but that is perfectly safe too and only an issue in the capital city.

US, New York, I don't boil my water (I have to specify state as people in flint michigan probably disagree)

I'm from germany and I drink my tap water without cooking it first, straight from the tap.

I wouldn't call US a developed country