A healthy obsession... or maybe OCD?

I have what some might call a bit of an obsession. :)

I like to take informed decisions, but the process of ‘informing’ myself can sometimes be long. And I mean *long*, by most people’s standards.

The latest one concerned drinking water, and one would think that that alone should have been reason enough for a quick decision, but that would be underestimating my ability to procrastinate.

Anyway, to begin at the beginning: I moved into my current house at Yari Road about 6 months back. It’s a nice enough house, though the building is very old and not very well maintained, but that’s another story. Even when I had first moved in, the broker had informed me about the water situation- that the water in the tap is a mix of BMC (ie municipal supply) and borewell water, and therefore, I should procure drinking water from the couple of taps in H block that have continuous BMC water supply. For the first week, while I was still settling down, I got a 20l bottle of Bisleri while I tried to figure out what to do about drinking water. For those of you who are not from the country, let me tell you that the water that is supplied by our municipal corporations, though treated, is often not fit for drinking. There are all kinds of impurities and contamination to be found in the water, and while many of us seem to have developed a healthy immunity thanks to having grown up here, sometimes even we succumb to water borne diseases. And that is why there is a wide variety of water purifiers available in the market, all of which do brisk business.

Having said that, BMC water is actually not bad in most places. There is a friend of mine who scoffs at me and drinks water straight off the tap, but then he has the constitution of an ox. I have in fact had water at his place many times and survived it, but that simply wasn’t an option I was willing to consider as a permanent solution. Besides, much as I would love to trust our government agencies, it’s just not practical. So as I sipped on Bisleri that first week, I happened to visit a friend who lives in the same building. I was surprised to learn that she had no idea that the water in the tap wasn’t entirely BMC and had happily been using it, albeit with a storage water filter. I corrected her, and told her how all the residents, or most of them anyway, get their drinking water from H block in cans. That’s what all the big white cans lined up on the ground floor are for; they pay the guard a monthly fee to fill them up and leave them at their doorstep everyday. But she couldn’t be bothered, she declared, and neither could I, I decided.

And how about the purification? Well, as far as eliminating microorganisms is concerned, the surest, most effective way is boiling water and that’s what I decided to do, in lieu of getting a filter. Sure it’s tedious, and sometimes one plain forgets; the worst is when you plain forget after you’ve put the vessel on the burner, and an half hour later you smell something burning- you run into the kitchen to find a red hot steel vessel, disfigured for life! But you get used to it all after a while.

So what happened now, six months later? Well, lately I’ve noticed a layer of oil in the boiled water. Also there is a residue of salt in my plants, left behind by the evaporated water I assume. Both these trouble me needless to say, and when my maid mentioned to me (not for the first time,) that I should reconsider where I’m getting my drinking water from, and worse- that she never drinks water at my place because I use tap water, that really was the last straw!

I got myself another big bottle of Bisleri and got down to the task of researching to figure out a solution. Here are the findings of two days of off-and-on and half a day of concentrated researching and reading:

The kind of purifier you use depends on the quality of water in your area (but of course.)

In my case, since part of the water was ground water, it was likely to contain oil, solid contaminants, and dissolved salts. All of these are hard to remove, and only by a process called reverse osmosis. RO filters are some of the most expensive in the market and are not efficient- they waste 2 to 3 times as much water as they purify. These factors effectively ruled out a wall mounted water purifier connected to the tap.

This left the other solution- getting water from downstairs in a water can. I am not very comfortable with the idea of a plastic water can to get and store water, however temporarily. This is not to say that I have managed to eliminate plastic from my life- not by a long shot, but I am trying!

Even if one gets BMC water, there is the matter of purifying it, although this task is much easier since this water does not contain oils and dissolved salts and is already treated with both UV radiation and chlorine.

Therefore, even a simple storage type water filter should suffice (which typically uses activated carbon though companies nowadays have patended technologies, using two or more steps) though even in this case, boiling is best.

I have read reports of doctors saying that one should boil water even after filtering/ purifying using a purifier! By the way, the right way to purify water by boiling is to bring it to a rolling boil and let it boil for about a minute if you reside near sea level, and for 3 minutes at higher altitudes. It doesn’t even need to boil really, it just needs to attain a temperature of 72deg for about 5 minutes, but since this is harder to achieve practically, bringing to boil and letting it boil for 1 minute is recommended (although is there was a way around it, it would lead to substantial saving in fuel consumption.) Storage of this water needs some care so as to not contaminate it post boiling.

And while several top companies such as Eureka Forbes (the market leader in water purifiers), Tata and HUL, all have very affordable storage water filters in the market, do a basic search for reviews and you would realise almost none are hassle free, though HUL clearly scores better than the others. (I won’t get into the technologies they use, for while I am vaguely aware of them, I am none the wiser as to which is better.)

But, there is an environmental cost to boiling water- it uses LPG which is not a renewable resource.

So there it is then- that is my dilemma. Most people would just go for a filter I suppose and it is probably the wiser choice. It saves one the hassle of having to boil water and does a reasonably good job of purifying water of BMC quality. A filter like HUL’s Pure-it actually uses a two stage process where it eliminates solid articles by passing the water through thin semi pervious membranes, and chlorinates.

Heck, most people would have done that without the research and the waste of a couple of days! :)

I’ll just draw solace in thinking of myself as a little better informed- for whatever it’s worth.