A surprising amount of Americans refuse to drink tap water entirely, in their own suburban homes with quality municipal water, or anywhere else they travel, holding the opinion that plastic bottled water is safer and better. Of course bottled water is regulated far less than tap water, and contains an ungodly amount of microplastics from manufacturing and storage.
Under-sink RO systems seem pretty great to me, anywhere you live. With a small holding tank, municipal water pressure is enough to drive small RO cartridges, requiring no electrical power to run, and giving more than sufficient flow rate for all drinking water. I think the biggest downside is a few hundred dollars in initial setup, and cartridges every year or two. This seems safer than relying on the changing opinions of experts as to what amount of harmful chemicals are safe to drink.
I think the writer is sidestepping the main issue most of the people who want to filter their water are thinking about. Sure, your tap water is within the federal limits for contaminants. The issue is that these limits are significantly too high for PFAS out of convenience for the water supplying side.
Wirecutter "expert" doesn't hold much sway for me with the quality of their reviews these days.
>Why you should trust me
Absolutely zero mention of qualifications. If you do not have a chemistry/chemical engineering degree, or something closely related then why would anyone want to bother with your verbose writing?
> I hated my pitcher filter long before I knew I didn’t need it. It would clog up any time a bit of rusty water came through the pipes, which, in a 70-year-old building with cast-iron service lines, was often.
I'm a little confused that this is used as an argument against filtering water. I get that iron is not a particularly worrisome contaminant, but I still don't want the occasional "bit of rusty water" showing up in my glass
It's mostly for taste at this point, rather than safety. For a long time I used to drink right from the tap, now use a filter pitcher simply because it tastes better.
I'm a dude who doesn't care to run a chemical analysis of my municipal water every couple days. I filter my water.
I go back and forth on the issue. I read our local municipal water reports but then things like this happen https://www.vaildaily.com/news/climax-mine-can-now-release-h...
Denver water couldn't force the mine to continue cleanup of the molybdenum (because they're bankrupt) and instead raised the tolerable levels of molybdenum in Denver water. The same thing happened in 2017, 2010 and I'm certain before that. And then we have things like this https://www.cpr.org/2025/06/04/free-private-well-testing-ote...
Colorado has some serious issues with mine runoff and water contamination.
https://www.pagosasun.com/stories/the-day-the-river-turned-o...
Wirecutter was bad before the NYT acquisition and now it's lot any/all remaining credibility.
Much like CNBC, it's completely "turned the corner" for me and I take their editorial as a negative signal.
In other words, definitely filter your water.
> It is also certified for Particulate Class 1, which is a surrogate for microplastics.
Based on a web search, it looks like Particulate Class 1 means particles in the 0.5 to 1 micron range. Several carbon block filters are rated at 0.5 µm, so I guess they're meant to handle those microplastics, but it leaves me wondering:
Do any smaller microplastics exist? Are they likely to be present in municipal water supplies?
All the filter cartridges that I've seen, and almost all the housings and tubes that hold them and the water, are made at least partly of plastic. Given that water typically sits in these filtration systems for hours or days at a time when the tap is closed, could it be that microplastics are leaching into the water from them?
Our tap water has strong chlorine smell. Since we add a filter, chlorine smell is gone and water taste better. When I drink unfiltered water from my parents house, I immediately recognise it.
That's nice. In the UK, tap water tastes like chlorine. If you are unfortunate enough to have chloraminated water, just letting it sit is insufficient. You need a filter which can remove the chloramine. After this, the water is actually too hard to make good coffee with, so I either zerowater it or distill it and then mix it with the filtered water using a TDS meter to hit a rough reference point (EC meters are not accurate gauges of TDS, but that's fine, you just want a consistent TDS not a precise TDS).
So sure, if you live in a civilised country and your water doesn't taste like shit and doesn't make your coffee taste awful and you trust your government to not give you poison or have tested your water to ensure it won't hurt you, go right ahead, be my guest.
But I will continue filtering my water because I hate the taste of chlorine and want to make the best out of the expensive coffee I buy.
The quality of your water varies with the district you live in. My municipal water provider puts chloramine in the water to kill bacteria. Occasionally we get high levels of chloramine, which is disgusting (smell and taste), but the water filter removes it. Occasionally they flush the pipes, which turns the water red, which is mentally disturbing, but the water filter removes the rust.
So while it's important to me that my municipal water is technically safe to drink, I still have a better experience with my drinking water when I use a filter. While it's amusing that this technical expert considers rust-red water to be "delicious", do they have family members, or friends that visit and consume beverages, and do these other people get to have an opinion?
After covid I noticed that drinking tap water was making me noticeably worse but buying packaged mineral water didn't (this was done over a few months). I later bought reverse osmosis and never hit that problem since. However, this year I learned that I live in a high-PFAS area (up to 300ng/L) so I am wondering if I was hitting PFAS overload somehow. Most of my flowers died quickly after watering them with the same tap water as well (when I still tried to have some house flowers).
How much PFAS does the average water filter add to your water?
(How much PFAS do you get from plastic-bottled water / soft drinks instead of the stuff coming out of metal pipes?)
The whole topic seems to be infused with a lot of loss-of-control issues…
In the end, there’s just so many more vague risks affected by the society you live in.
Driving a bit slower will probably offset a great deal of those.
Well, the current US administration is all against the environmental protection, so I expect the article advice might change in the nearest hears.
if you are someone who regularly cleans and replaces your water filter, it's probably not hurting.
For most people their water filters are probably contributing more mold and contaminants than removing.
People are really funny about water. Recently had family visit us in Portugal, and they refused to drink the tap water anywhere - despite it being an EU country and complying with relevant standards, rigorously.
Then again, they also refused to drink our water at home, which I know is nothing but H2O, as we live off grid and it all goes through numerous filters before hitting the RO.
Then again, where they live (and drink the tap water), I also drink the tap water, because again, EU, safe - but it tastes like a swimming pool, as they dose it heavily with chlorine.
Each to their own.
Any concern about pharmaceuticals making it into tap water? Microplastics?
I also don't filter my water, but I live in central Europe and our tap watrr adheres to stricter standards than bottled water, so there's that.
Filtered water tastes better.
Where I live there are area local water reports, so you can enter your street and see where your water is coming from and a report, with quite a lot of measurements and including legal limitations for these measurements.
Water filtration should be an informed decision, based on what water you are actually getting.
Yep use it if it makes you feel better. I know water treatment people in my area have talked about the no need to use filters.
The fact that potable water is so cheap in the developed world that you can use a gallon of it to flush your toilet is a miracle of civilization. Filter it if that makes you feel better, but it's a waste of money, and a dismissal of a major achievement in public health.
But hey, at least it's not bottled water, which is basically tap water that has been put in a single-use plastic bottle and trucked across the country.
where can I check how much PFAS my local water in EU contains?
So, his suggestion isn't to buy a water filter system and filters that could last you 10+ years but instead to pay $300 for a test. Retarded. The NYTimes is such a joke and so is this guy. If you're living in newer construction in a place like NYC then you're likely going to be fine. I am in this group currently but I will be moving back to the bay soon and I will have to use my RO system.
If you live in the bay area, you know you have to filter your water because it tastes like metal. We hadn't even had an electric kettle for more than six months in our startup with less than 5 employees using it, the entire bottom of the kettle was covered in 1/4" thick plates of various minerals. Obviously, water differs per city but this was a common occurrence throughout the bay area. The water, of course, always tasted poorly. I'm not even getting into how the housing stock in the bay area is decrepit and full of homes and apartments that are nowhere near up to modern construction standards. You have copper pipes? That's cool but you probably still have lead solder in those pipes. Who knows what kind of supply pipes are coming off the street. Yeah, your local supply probably replaced the ones that run in the street but the ones on your property? Unlikely. Your fittings? Still could have up to 8% lead until 2014. The amount of homes I'd see that still have knob and tube wiring was astounding. You can bet your ass that place still has an abundance of lead all over it.
The poor tasting water in the bay area is reason enough to filter it - even if it wasn't for all these other issues like most homes not being up to modern standards. A lot of these water tests are done at the county's office. It does not reflect what your home will add to your water supply. So, yeah, getting at home test could be nice... for $300... or you could just install a nice RO system that will last many years and give you better water anyway.
Money quote:
> readings of PFAS that exceed EPA limits have been found in just 8% of small public water systems (those that serve fewer than 10,000 people) and 15% of large ones
15%!
Anyone who trusts their municipal water supply because of *handwave* regulations and reports needs to read that again.
Even if my water were 100% pristine as the author's apparently is, which they only know for their own homes because they've tested it at their taps half a dozen times with different laboratories, my tap water still tastes awful, and maintaining a dedicated three stage filter spout next to my kitchen faucet costs me approximately nothing and provides substantially better tasting water. And I don't need to worry about whether I live in the next Flint, Michigan.
It took two whole years for administrators in Flint, Michigan to acknowledge their lead pipe crisis. What your treatment plant claims it does and what your municipal government claims your safety profile is do not matter one bit if you aren't constantly testing the water actually coming out of your taps.
I'd rather just filter my water. It's much less hassle and I get better tasting water as a nice bonus.