Rest Isn’t Best When It Comes To Water — In Your Pipes and Filters

Water flowing from your faucet in the morning may have more in it than you want to put in your body

You wake up at 4 a.m. after going to bed at 9:30 p.m. After six and one-half hours of mouth breathing, you are thirsty. You trundle your body into the kitchen, lurch over to the cupboard filled with cups that you don’t want to read, and blindly turn on your kitchen faucet. Ahhhhhhhhhhh, that’s better. Now, if you can keep your brain from turning on, you might get another one and one-half hour of sleep before you have to get up.

Does this sound about right? Yeah, we all have been there. Here’s the twist. That water you drank…4 oz., or 12 oz., that water was sleeping for the same time as you. Except, while it slept, it was stagnant and collecting all sorts of molecules from the piping hugging it – metals, chemicals, etc. When you turned on your faucet and filled your cup, you filled it with stagnant, stale, tainted water. Now, times that by the volume of water you consume similarly throughout your life. Yep, it doesn’t look good. And we haven’t even started mentioning germs.

Sure, we wash our hands to get rid of what we don’t see — but, what about what we can’t see in our water?

This scenario doesn’t matter if you are on a private well or public utility. It doesn’t immediately get better if you have filtration. Actually, if you have filtration it might get worse depending on what and how you are filtering. The water sitting in those canisters/filters is brewing in the funk collected in the sediment filter, stewing in the activated charcoal carbon filter or the reverse osmosis tank. You turn on the water, fill your cup, and wash that mouth breathing away…with water that should be flushed first.

Factor in the chemicals from the treatment plant, the quality/age and condition of the municipal piping ferrying your water, and the piping in your own home. Survivalists teach that water in motion is your safest bet for not contracting death; water that is calm and still most certainly will accelerate your date with the afterlife in the wild. The same is true for the water in our homes and office complexes. There is a large body of research promulgated by COVID-19 regarding water in piping within buildings left vacant for extended periods. The same recommendations are presented for such scenarios as can be found for the homes in which we reside.

It matters not, if you rent or own, if your home is new or old, if you are on public municipal water or private well/stream. You could have lead or benzene on municipal water source, or arsenic, fertilizers, and fecal materials on private water source. Anytime your water has been sitting, you really should let the water run for 20-30 secs., if not a bit longer. If, like me, you are a granola-crunching hippie, then you might consider “catching” that water for any indoor plants or porch plants (not edibles) so you are wasting less water.

Case in point, the EPA has goals and limits for contaminants in our water sources. The goals – maximum contaminant level goal (MCLG) – often are of a lesser amount than the actual enforced limit – maximum contaminant level (MCL). True story – bromate has an MCLG of 0, but an enforced limit of 0.010 mg/L. Bromate comes from disinfecting our drinking water and is a known contributor to cancer. For a full list, visit the EPA’s site on these limits here.

Our governments set guidelines for water quality safety, but said guidelines only do so much

Here's another way to think about it – we are taught NOT to drink water from the hot water line because the temperatures in our water heaters might afford for organic growth that doesn’t play well with our microbiomes (and, actually, hot water is a tricky topic as there are other reasons to avoid drinking or cooking with it). Well, the risk is similar for that water sleeping in your lines for several hours. It needs to be flushed out a bit to reduce (not eliminate) the chance for sickness, inclusive of slow poisoning. Heavy metals, leached chemicals (anyone out there familiar with breakpoint chlorination in PEX lines…), sometimes cross-contaminations – filtration can manage most of these, but you have to know what sort of filtration, have to be able to pay for said filtration, and then still should flush the water in said filters prior to consuming if its been sitting there overnight. As soon as water deoxygenates, other funky stuff starts happening. And deoxygenation has happened overnight.

We are a simple species when it comes to thriving or falling dead. Keep the bad stuff out, limit to the greatest extent possible small amounts of the bad stuff you can’t keep out and get your rest every day.

Post-script — the CDC has a well-populated host of information related to this topic. I don’t agree with the advice regarding flushing (they don’t think you need to unless you are away for a bit), but there is, nonetheless, good information herein.