Depending upon where you live and where your home’s water comes from, pollution can affect your drinking water. Most instances of water pollution at home occur when using a well or receiving from groundwater supplies. Most of the common problems at home occur with the drinking water, contaminated pond and swimming pools.
If your home supply comes from a regulated treatment plant, then it should be safe to drink if public water standards are held to high levels, but it may not taste so good. In the United States, public treatment plants don’t treat water for what are considered “objectionables.” Objectionables are defined as items such as taste and odor. While the water will be safe to drink, it won’t taste or smell very good.
But if your water comes from underground tables through a well, your well water can easily become contaminated. Some of the causes of water pollution include:
•Bacterial pollutants. At unseen level, bacterial pollution usually occurs in the developing world, unless your well is being fed downstream of a septic system or dairy or comes directly from a river or stream. Bacterial pollutants include giardia, cryptosporidiosis or coliform. Any one of these bacteria can make its way into your home plumbing or pool.
•Industrial processes that leach heavy metals into the water table, lakes or rivers. These are serious threats and can result in birth defects or cancer.
•Suspended iron particles, causing an orange discoloration.
•Suspended manganese, which adds a black stain to pipes and clothes.
•Sulfurs, which give a rotten egg smell.
Swimming pools can become contaminated if not treated with chlorine on a regular basis. Algae can easily contaminate a swimming pool that doesn’t receive regular doses of chlorine or filtration. Dirty or blocked filters can make water change its color. Bacteria can grow in these kinds of conditions which also makes the pool not safe to swim within. It’s important to keep pool filtered, chlorinated and fresh for swimming purposes.
Correcting Water Pollution
Most water pollution at home can be corrected with the right kind of treatment or filtration systems. Hard water includes increased amounts of calcium and magnesium. While it may seem problematic, it’s usually not a serious problem that requires treatment. Cleaning fixtures requires a little extra elbow grease and cleanser periodically. While many people don’t like the idea of using hard water, the most inexpensive solution is to treat hard water through an ion exchange, which requires the use of salt.
Sodium cannot be flushed into a septic system without seriously upsetting the bacteria balance required to make the septic work properly, and dispensing sodium onto the ground will cause plant life to die. Treating with sodium makes drinking water not drinkable, which then requires another treatment to remove the salt.
But iron, sulfurs and manganese can be treated safely and filtered with water treatment systems that use natural media such as gravel and other media. This makes it safe to drink—and it tastes good as well.
If your drinking water is free from all types of water pollution it is also safe to bathe in, wash dishes in and wash your clothes.
Many people think of point of use treatment systems such as filters to put on the faucet. But most people don’t understand that if they don’t change these devices regularly, they become a breeding ground for bacteria—which creates more water pollution at home, not less. These kinds of filtration systems are best left to publicly treated water where you know it is safe to drink but just may need a final polish or filtration to make it taste better. Using a point of use system on your well will tax the ability of the system to work efficiently and won’t reduce the water pollution at home. It won’t affect the water used for bathing or washing clothes—and these options become extremely expensive when they get caked up with minerals, iron bacteria or other contaminants.
To understand the seriousness of pollution at home, it helps to understand where your supply comes from. Polluted water is not safe to drink under any conditions. While some people may consider “boiling” to make it safe, without a complete chemical analysis of what’s in your drinking water, it’s hard to know if it’s safe to drink. Boiling doesn’t take out industrial chemicals or pollutants, but it will kill certain bacteria if boiled for the required amount of time. For more information read our list of water pollution facts.