A Tale of Warning on Home Filtration Systems...
I had a highly-rated plumber from Angie's List come in to do some repairs and he asked if their "whole house water filtration" guy could come visit. I was in a good mood so I let him, since I had no education on these systems I figured I would see what a snake charmer education would look like.
He did a test on my tap water where he took a couple shots of water into a plastic cup and squirted some chemical into it. A minute later the water turned yellow. He said that showed chlorine was in the water, normal for city water, but went on to talk about how bad chlorine is for you, how it gasifies during steaming hot showers and how quickly the body absorbs it, to which he swished the yellow water around and spit it back into the cup as a clear liquid. Shazam...his body absorbed the chlorine. I looked at their whole-house systems, from $3,000 or so up to $10,000. Of course I took a pass and thanked him.
Next visit by same plumber (on-going work), brought a memo from their company talking about chlorine and newborn baby problems. No citation. I Googled around and discovered that some studies were done in the UK where the Chlorine level is 3, 4+ ppm whereas most American cities are 2ppm. Apparently the study found that mothers who drank highly chlorinated city water in the UK had an insignificant increase from an insignificant baseline in birth defects. To me, the risk of falling into an alligator pit by slipping on a banana peel under a ladder had higher odds. But hey, 1 in a million to 2 in a million is still a 100% increase, right? And that's how these "studies" are broadcast. So I wrote it off as irrelevant and assume the company is just using scare tactics (he knew my wife was pregnant).
To be sure, I bought a water test kit from Amazon.com that came highly rated and tests for about a half dozen things. All results were fine, and the chlorine level was between 0 and 1ppm. Barely registered. We use a PUR pitcher filter for drinking water anyway, and the fridge has filtered water in the door as well.
Plumber came back a third time, my wife was the only one here but she knew the whole story. He tried to scare her into it by talking about how he had a baby on the way and he bought the low end system just because of his concern for birth defects. She told him about the test we did and how there was barely any chlorine in the water. He was adamant that there was because they had already tested it. He ran out to his truck and grabbed the test kit, a sample of our tap water and he and my wife watched the cup.
Nothing. He added a few more drops. Nothing. He said, "I guess your husband was right" and left, embarrassed.
He left behind the chemical tester by accident so I Googled it. Very bad tester used to test Chlorine in pools, unreliable results. Interestingly, also highly carcinogenic. Still think that other guy is going around swishing a carcinogen around in his mouth to show absorption rates? HA! I don't think so!
You can imagine how many scenarios I have come up with on what their game was.
