Pour a glass of drinking water from your kitchen tap. It may look crystal clear. It may have no odour or no offensive taste. But can you be certain that glass doesn’t contain any harmful ingredients?

No.

Why is that?

Whether your water source is from your municipality, a private well, or a nearby body of water, clear water doesn’t necessarily mean your drinking water is as clean and safe as you’d like it to be.

Municipal Water

The heavy regulation and monitoring of municipal water in most cases ensures its potability — that is, it is safe to drink. It is typically drawn from a body of water, like a river or a lake. Or it’s removed from groundwater by wells drilled deep into the earth.

Once it reaches the municipality’s treatment plant, it undergoes various processes to remove impurities, bacteria, and pathogens. Most treatment plants use chlorine and chlorine by-products as part of the process. Various methods of filtration remove sediments and other undesirable particles. Often, other elements like fluoride are added to the water in the journey to your home.

Water will most always be totally safe when it leaves the treatment plant. However, safety can be compromised in the journey to your kitchen tap. It needs to travel through the municipality’s water delivery infrastructure. Given the age and condition of the pipes in many cities and towns, the potential for picking up undesirable materials exists. Once it enters your home, again, the age and condition of your home’s plumbing can impact the quality of your water.

In addition to that, the chlorine used to treat the water at the municipal plant will still be in your home’s water supply. Many other undesirable chemicals can bypass the treatment plant systems, like traces of pharmaceutical medication, PFOAs, PFAs, asbestos, lead, and arsenic. All these can find their way into your drinking water.

Private Well Water

A home serviced by a private well will encounter a host of different issues. In addition to hard water experienced by most in Manitoba and NW Ontario, you may deal with:

• iron
• manganese
• nitrates
• sulphates
• heavy metals
• bacteria and other pathogens

Virtually every home on a private well in Manitoba has very hard water. Hard water will affect your appliances, your skin, and your hair — but it is NOT a health risk. Nor is iron. But the others on the list have the potential to have health consequences. If present, they need to be addressed to make your drinking water safe.

If you have a private well, never forget the onus is on you to maintain it and the quality of the water pumped from the ground. It’s easy to take this responsibility for granted—but it is critical for you and your family to take this seriously.

Lake and River Water

Many municipalities use lakes and rivers as their source of water. Brandon and Portage La Prairie draw water from the Assiniboine River. Morden uses water from Lake Minnewasta.  Kenora takes its water from Lake of the Woods.

Like these municipalities, many cottage owners and residents use lakes or rivers as their source of drinking water. And like their municipal counterparts, they need to treat their water.

While lake and river water are typically not nearly as hard as well water, there are many other issues to consider in treating it for home or cottage use. Included are:

• sediment
• tannins
• algae
• nitrates (from pesticide & herbicide run-off)
• industrial waste
• sewage (from municipalities and faulty septic fields)
• bacteria and other pathogens (like Giardia or Cryptosporidium)

Depending on the quality of the source water, you may want to treat your water with a point-of-entry (or whole home system), a point-of-use system, or a combination of both.

Water Test

The only way to know if you have an issue with your water is to have it tested. Pristine Water will come to your home and perform a free water test. While our test can be revealing, water dealers like us can’t test for many variables. Tests for bacteria, heavy metals, and chemicals like fluoride should be done in a certified laboratory.

Every well water owner should have his or her water tested for pathogens once a year. Should our test reveal any suspicious readings, we can recommend other variables for a certified lab to test.

With the water tests results,  we can recommend the proper drinking water solutions to deal with each issue of concern.