I learned more about water from this 10 and a half minute video than i did in 17 years of public education and then 12 more in the wild. Good stuff my guy, big preesh 💪🏿
Water treatment professional here. I’ve been working in water treatment since my times in the nuclear navy and have 14 years in water treatment. Everything from pre-treatment to wastewater. This was a great video and pretty informative. Many people don’t know the actual process of how water is cleaned up for municipalities and the Reverse osmosis process and what it all entails. Reverse osmosis is fairly wasteful in general though. If you’re just making purer water, typically and on average, for every 1 gallon of water being used, 75% will only be usable. And that’s solely dependent upon the reverse osmosis design; the design pressure, array (configuration of the vessels), cross flow, membrane type, temperature of incoming water and water quality just to name a few. Many places that use boilers for steam generation use RO WATER to improve water quality, reduce fuel, and water chemical costs. Beverage industries like Niagara water or Dasani use technologies that allow for 90% of the water to be usable (if not more ) This was a great video and look forward to more. Keep up the great work !
I do have a question about that processing of water. Why is it that I like the taste of Detroit (MI) city tap water, but not that I relocated to Lafayette (IN), I can't stand drinking tap water? The Detroit water tastes clean & crisp. Lafayette water tastes & smells odd to me. Could it be that Lafayette water (from aquafers) has more minerals?
In my house you'd get a glass of water straight from my tap, with ice from my countertop ice maker. My tap and ice maker is fed by a regularly maintained reverse osmosis filter. What's funny is, my family has always maintained reverse osmosis systems for drinking and cooking. In my teens I started liking refrigerated tap water dispenser from our refrigerator. But then something funny happened. I went to Colorado, ignoring the if giardia, I was in the mountains and drank straight from a cool glacial stream and was shocked. It tasted like certain bottled waters and the reverse osmosis. It took me around 5 years of living on my own before my city tap water quality declined so noticably, I started investing in reverse osmosis systems. I tested and found nitrates in the city tap water a few years ago, I reported it and had to send it some samples. But of course, I know a little more about water in general than your average bear. I am a swimming pool technician and I am a hobbiest fish keeper, keeping both fresh and saltwater fish. Mostly different kinds of puffer fish.
I lived at the base of the Blue Ridge mountains in Virginia for a heavy dose of my life. There was no limit to mountain spring-fed creeks and a ton of straight-out-the-ground springs. That water just hit way differently with all the minerals in it and how cold it was, even in the middle of summer. I have yet to have water that tastes that good from any reverse osmosis system or that comes from any bottle! Oddly enough the water that came from our well must have gone through iron deposits because it was loaded with it we had a filter set up to remove all of that to use in the house, but it also removed the mineral taste I enjoyed.
I finally realized why I like your content so much- you are like the Bill Nye the science guy of RU-vid. Thank you for making such engaging material. I thoroughly enjoy it!
except he's way smarter then bill nye! bill nye was just an actor and had no degrees! just a script! this guy knows his nutrition and does tons of research!
I’m so happy I found this channel. We need more people interested in science and the scientific method. People who are aware of biases, what hypotheses are, what scientific theories are, what peer review is and how important it is. I’m 61 and I’m always so excited to see young people interested in science. With all the conspiracy theories and misinformation happening today, we really need good, skeptical, scientific, YOUNG minds to keep things rationale and fact based!! You give me hope for the future!
I get reverse-osmosis water water from a water store, because it's ultra cheap to fill up a 5 gallon jug and close by. As I understand it, storing a large volume of water in a bigger plastic container is necessarily going to be safer than storing the same volume of water in many smaller containers, simply because of the square cube law. I invert it over a glass dispenser jar (which, unfortunately has a plastic spigot...) as a water cooler. At some point I'll swap to a glass jug and use a better (cushioned) jar with a stainless spigot, but I have other priorities right now and I use the water fast enough that it doesn't sit in the jug for long.
You are a hell of a communicator. What is your background if you don't mind me asking? You take complicated as heck topics, clean em up, filter em down to the vital bits and deliver them in a concise and informative way. Its really impressive, I hope you blow up, you deserve way more views. This channels up there with Smarter every day, veratasium, electroboom, how to cook that, just to name a few.
I'm glad I found your channel ~ you're cool, informative, entertaining, and all-around delightful. It's not much, but please accept this as a token of my appreciation. I hope you're able to continue making content as long as it's enjoyable for you, and I hope you get the million+ subs you deserve👏👏👏🧡💛💚💙❤😘
Love your channel, just needed to comment that I always hit the like button before your videos commence. Moreover, I’d say I’m not the only one who does this. 😊😊😊
Artesian wells are the ones that have enough pressure to run over the top. The static water level inside a well is where the resting level is. Water will run down mountains but when it goes into an underground aquifer filtered for hundreds of miles through granite and sand and gravel it will become pure.
I'm so glad I found your channel! I've been worried about water for a long time, and have been dismayed by the lack of progress in my lifetime toward getting good water to all people. The current fad of buying bottled water instead of properly funding community water departments, makes me mad. Since we are not going to quit our water habit, I consider the accessibility to clean good water not only imperative, but a human right. The push to privatize water supply for profit is IMO an evil ambition. Collecting rainwater has quietly become "illegal" in municipality after municipality (where water departments are municipal). Where water is controlled by the state, efforts are made to make laws that say even every drop of rain that falls, belongs to the state. When I lived in California, I was surprised to learn that if you had a well on your property, the state would put a meter on it! I came from a state where if you had a well, that was your water. During water restrictions, you would see the rare green lawn had a sign on it, "This lawn was watered with well water." As I say, I've been worried about this for a long time, since I was a child. I am 76. Keep your water supply from becoming privatized. Keep gathering rainwater legal!
I really appreciate you choosing topics that are not as well known but everybody can use and apply! I'd love to see a follow-up video about why humans need minerals/electrolytes and how this dovetails into our water sources, e.g. why springs/wells are so great for humans and what modern purified water lacks for human health
What I would really like to see, and something I've struggled with (mainly due to everything I try tasting horrible in even the smallest amounts), is what natural constituents to add back to water after it's been purified, to make it closer to nature. There's a lot of really important trace minerals and such, but every time I try, it just tastes awful, even though I actually like the taste of natural water. I can't seem to recreate it. I'll also mention that structured water seems legit, because the stuff I've tested at home, while I couldn't tell the difference, Mom was able to guess correctly every time, and it seemed quite obvious which was which to her. The idea here, as I understand it, is that water tends to remember the electrical signature of whatever was in it, and you can essentially reset it, like a hard drive, by passing it through a strong magnetic field multiple times. There are other ways to do it, such as natural water flow patterns found in rivers and such, but I used a vortex magnetizer for my tests, which is essentially a "tornado in a bottle" with a ring of magnets around it.
This was the most damn interesting video I've seen in a long time... I've been drinking tap water all my life and never trusted plastic bottled water, everyone always acts like I'm insane because of it and seems to be the opposite lol
The joys of the United States. Many places in the world can't trust their tap water. Bottled water is convenient when there isn't a ready source of drinking water.
You got a like buddy, good stuff as per. I live in rural Norfolk UK, on a farm with its owm 100 metre deep borehole thatt was many years ago drilled into the chalk aquifer below. The water is beautiful to drink, many times tastier than the tap water I occasionally have to tolerate. The difference cannot be explained in words, it's something you have to experience.
I was raised on spring water from a well in the foothills of the Appalachians. Most of what we drank was water. Actually, most days, we only drank water. It was cold right out of the tap and frankly, was delicious. A glass of water at our cousin's house or my grandmother's house was very different. I drank it but didn't think it was delicious. Then we moved to Florida and I straight-up wouldn't drink tap water. It was bad enough to shower in it, I wasn't going to drink it! So I mostly drank soda and coffee. I'm now in Virginia and I drink tap water filtered through a Brita pitcher. It's not delicious but it doesn't taste like drinking bleach. Any time I travel back home, I drink the tap water.
The best water on earth? Easy, it came out of an old pitcher pump that was in my grandparent's back yard. We used to fill water troughs that we watered the mules and chickens. It was always cold and had a mineral/iron taste.
When I was a kid we had a 900ft deep water table well, the water was exceptional, kinda of amazing tbh. It actually tasted good and felt like you were actually drinking something. To this day I miss that water.
I just now discovered you. You're GREAT! Sent over some love (in the form of $$) and subscribed. Gotta get you some more subscribers! Keep bringing REAL science. We need you!
I live in an area where the tap water is as fresh and clean if not more than bottled water, which is really nice and I appreciate it. I do sometimes visit other countries where such thing isn't possible and we have to buy bottled water because the tap water isn't safe for consumptionn
- I mentioned the privilege it is to even discuss options, if you're compelled to give to folks who lack decent water at all, I've heard good things about www.charitywater.org/. - Also, if you're curious if there's a spring near you, try: findaspring.com - Also, @3:00 should've used the word "diffusion" here, not "osmosis".
Why am I only discovering this channel now? What kind algorithm manipulation is this? Anyways, I’m just here to say I love this channel. Wishing you the best of luck.
I love this perspective too this topic! I've pondered about this exact thing. Like daydream pondering about this topic. There's so much to it. Even makes the invention of beer/alcohol understandable.
Great information!!! Let me add a bit more information that you didn't touch on. I can tell you exactly what happened even until the 1800's ... Beer. You see, folks knew when water wasn't safe all the way back to Greece and Egypt and likely before, but no documentation off the top of my head. Many, many folks died of water-borne illnesses. Somewhere along the line, folks discovered that during the process of fermentation, they could drink something made with the water they had available (which they dumped everything into, washed their clothes in, bathed in) relatively safely. The fermentation killed the bacteria. So EVERYONE, including children, drank beer. That sounds really bad, but the beer of old is not the beer of today by any means. Kids weren't walking around drunk. Alcohol content was negligible. Kids were still drinking beer when the first US colonies were formed and well after. The very short version is that first came beer, then Absinthe (during WWI) but children couldn't drink it. Then rudimentary filtering, then chlorine, then fluoride for teeth, then the very, very expensive filtering process that we have now that is fairly well unnecessary other than to change taste (in first world countries anyway). As kids in the 70's we drank municipal supply both from the tap and out of the hose. In some places (like DFW), once a year in the fall, a temperature inversion would happen in lakes and reservoirs, which gave us brown water that smelled like dead fish. That's when we got commercial filtered water for a few months. You DO know that Evian (which was the first large commercially available bottled water) is Naive spelled backwards? Now, springs used to be a great source of natural water. When I was a kid, someone in New Mexico, on a mountain road, built a water fountain in the middle of nowhere and we just HAD to stop and drink from it every time we passed it. Now? It's closed. Fertilizer, farming run-off ... it's undrinkable. When I was about 10-12, I went to a church camp in the NM mountains and part of our hike included drinking water from a stream (you just had to avoid swallowing minnows). Now? Nope. Contaminated. So, even if there's a spring, and you're pretty sure there's no farming nearby, what's required is a filter for the water bottle to be sure it's safe. Floating a river and cooling your beverages in the water (which we used to do as kids)? Nope. Popping open a cool can of water can give you all kinds of intestinal issues because of run-off. Even here in the US, a first world country, don't trust natural sources of water. Chemicals, normal bio bacteria that belongs in the lower gut doesn't belong in the upper gut, waste dumping ... just don't. Even the little bit on the lip of a can of soda or beer can take you out for days. As to aquifers, we've lived on a place with a well for 22 years. Only last year did we start using a water disperser because the water table was so dry because of drought here in the PNW that more than one neighbor had to have their well dug deeper. Not cheap. Also, just yesterday (6/1/23), Arizona stopped any further housing developments in Phoenix because their groundwater is calculated to last less than a century as per the current population and water consumption. If you're ever in France, especially mid southeast between Lyon and Avignon, there's a tiny village called Pont-en-Royans that has a water museum (we only knew because we have friends we visit there). They have water from all of the world. My favorite name comes from King Island just off of Tasmania called "Cloud Juice". Know who bottled black Bling water ... which is water with charcoal and a bottle with bling? The US of course. No other country would be dumb enough to buy into that. The museum also does tastings of both still and bubbly water, just like they do wine. Pretty awesome. One last note: "Distilled" water is NOT drinkable. For a lot of medical/chemical reasons that are too long to discuss here, it's only for Irons, crafts, and CPAP machines.
As a chemist I gotta say please say hydrogen ions, hydronium ions, or protons even you’re talking about pH. Saying hydrogen would be if you’re talking about hydrogen atoms or hydrogen gas, not correct. Otherwise A+, can’t wait for in depth episode.
Great explanation of the sources of water that we and other life forms use. On geological time scale, the amount of water on the Earth’s surface and groundwater can change with new water coming out of volcanoes from deep inside the Earth and other geological processes pulling water into the rocks more or less permanently.
I believe I actually do know where the best drinkable water is. I found it coming out of a crack in a rock high in a mountain. I haven’t drank it in twenty five years so difficult it is to access.
that's primary water, it's never talked about, it's the first water cycle, it is the best water for living things. they only teach about the secondary water cycle.
"Purer" water isn't always the best water but natural water from springs is always the best, fresh and pakced with healthy minerals aaand potentially radioactive ones too cause you never know what you're gonna find...
This is why the keystone pipeline extension would have been such a huge problem. TC Energy wanted to run it directly over the Ogallala Aquifer, which is a huge aquifer that covers most of Nebraska & parts of surrounding states. The company has averaged 1.83 spills per year (over the 13 years of the pipeline's operation) on the US side of existing keystone pipeline, 3.58 if you include those on Canada's side. That means it would only be a matter of when, not if, a spill happens over that aquifer and leaches into it contaminaiting the water supply the residents, farmers, businesses, etc... rely on.
So now there are no hazards in importing that oil on ships over the ocean. How many oil spills per year on ships bringing oil to the US or on trucks or trains? It doesn't protect the Earth. It just moves the problem out of sight and you forget about it.
Bottled water is not a new invention, but its widespread use is new. Evian and Perrier water were well known as Rich People's Water. But, the Gulf war (1993) caused a requirement for the military to provide water to its soldiers in desert climes. The military contracted for vast amounts of bottled drinking water to be sent overseas, and the companies making bottled drinking water saw an opportunity to market bottled water as better than tap water. Thus, the homeland market for bottled drinking water was started.
Water is immortal. Water has been here since the beginning of time and it cannot be destroyed. There is nothing that can live without Water. Water is more powerful than fire. Water can kill fire, but fire cannot harm Water. Water is the only thing that can transform its matter into a gas, a liquid, or a solid. The same Water that you drink today has quenched the thirst of everything that has ever lived and every blade of grass that has ever grown. Water is immortal. by S.L. Sanders (2019)
Lol! I'd boil fresh mountain spring water before drinking it! …because before it became a stream, some of it was soaking down shit. The minerals survive boiling, the parasites (&etc) don't.
Love your channel. honest. I don't see how you can point out that most of the world has water insecurity, and then promote bottled water. So many parts of bottled water are bad. bad for us, and bad for everybody. That seems like a disconnect. Like, enjoy your privilege at the expense of the world. We're #1, Suck it world. Not your typical message.
What do you mean?! There are so many big cities and entire countries with good tap water. how is the size of the population anyhow related to the quality of their tap water?
@@Gui-iq7dp City water is often, while potable, horrific tasting. That said, I've been to some cities with terrific water; but on the whole I stand by my observation. Population density is famously impactful on water quality.
I collect and save rainwater. Next, I distill it, add a "pinch" (1/8 tsp) of Redmond Real Salt to remineralize it, then store it vacuum-sealed in glass Mason jars. So, if I were to offer you a glass of water, THAT'S what you'd get.
Just want to point out that fear over the hypothetical harms of nuclear proliferation, which would lead to orders of magnitude cheaper energy, is also the reason fresh clean water is still scare in much of the world, among other negative externalities of FUD.
I like your channel so far and i love water. Your other video about "naked" water was awesome too. If i buy water bottles i buy spring. For home i use r/o and add himilayan salt or trace mineral drops. For years i drank straight r/o water and for the last several years been adding minerals back. Your other video reassured me that r/o and distilled are not the best to drink.
From "Ask Mr. Science" of Iowa City's Duck's Breath Mystery Theater comedy troupe, before he "legally changed his first name to Doctor": What is ground water? Ground water is water which has been through a hydroelectric dam and been ground up in the process of making electricity. After this the ground water is no good for drinking or irrigation, and is only useful for making sno- cones.
Tap water gang. I remember when bottled water was relatively rare and exceedingly bougie. (e.g. Perrier) When everyone started paying for bottled water I was all WTF what a scam!
Before I start the video, my water runs through an iSpring RO filter set with Alkaline filter. (Totaaalllyy unrelated to living less than 50 miles from a certain small town in Ohio that a certain train related woopsiedoodle that only conspiracy theorists think was serious since the Gov says "Everything is fine")
The best water comes out of water well I drilled at my old house. I’m a water well driller by trade and the water that was in my well was extremely pure extremely microscopic amount of iron that gives little flavor it’s perfect I stopped drinking water after I moved. It was .002 micrograms of iron and that’s it.
