Thursday, January 9, 2014

Water

I live on 88 acres in the Santa Cruz mountains and our water comes from a well. This is only my second experience with well water. Years ago my boyfriend and I lived on his fathers farm in Ohio with well water. The water had a lot of sulphur and iron in it. It smelled and tasted horrible! I remember my hair was always limp and it was difficult to get soap to lather. This was back in the 70's before people really bought water and so we just lived with it.
 


I have to say that most of the places I've lived have had poor public water that I would never consider drinking. By all accounts, the San Lorenzo Valley public water is excellent! It's by far better than any water you could buy. I used to live in Carpinteria and drove between Santa Barbara and Boulder Creek every weekend for 4 yrs. I used to haul back SLV public drinking water every week because the water in the whole central coast area was so bad. The public drinking water we had in Vermont was pretty gross as well. You would think that a place like Vermont would have clean drinking water. I remember coming home from work one day, turning on the faucet and being horrified by the bright orange flow coming out. Turned out that the city had done some work on the water main that day. It took a full half hour of leaving the faucet running to clear it out! I never drank their public water again after that.

The well water where I currently live is good. There is no odor and it tastes great. Soap lathers up just fine. I normally would have no reason to be concerned except that here in California, we are in the 3rd year of a drought. The drought definitely affects aquifers. As the water levels decrease, more of the surrounding sediment gets deposited into the water supply. Because the water isn't regulated I'm curious as to the make-up of the water I'm drinking?

Water accounts for 75% of our brain and muscles and 22% of our bones. It carries nutrients and oxygen to our cells, removes waste, cushions joints and regulates our body temperature. In a nutshell, having access to clean drinking water is important in maintaining our health.

I recently have started looking into alternative sources of drinking water and the choices are mind boggling to say the least! What are the differences between distilled and reverse osmosis? What are the advantages of one water filter system over another?  The water store charges 49 cents per gallon for their reverse osmosis water. The local health food store has an in-store water station that sells purified water for 30 cents a gallon. You can buy drinking water out of a vending machine for even less... 25 cents per gallon. The guy at the water store offered to test my well water for free, but the test is only for mineral content and not for disease causing pathogens. Testing for pathogens can get pretty pricey! Decisions decisions...

Honestly, I don't really care where my water comes from as long as I can be assured that what I'm drinking tastes good and is safe. Drinking fresh clean water is the foundation of our overall health and probably the #1 thing we can do maintain a healthy lifestyle. I'll drink to that!




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