Never. We have Brita pitchers at home and Brita filter water bottles at work.

So "spring" and "mineral" water is not really spring and mineral, but tap?

No, we don't buy it, though I do buy seltzer. We have an under-sink filter.

Anonymous wrote:Only drink bottled water. I don't trust local water utility and infrastructure. Important for people to look up water quality reports from local water company and not all local water supply can be relied upon. Mine is not quite flint yet but the report is bad enough that I don't have the peace of mind to drink out of the tap.

But bottled water is not more regulated than what comes out of your tap. A good portion of bottled water is just tap water. That's been put in a bottle.

You realize that many types of bottled water is just tap water from some big "bottling" plant, right?

You are just paying for it and polluting with the damn bottles. Stop that.

We have a reverse osmosis water filter in our house. The water tastes gross before that. DH did some kind of test and I don't remember what chemical/substance measured but the numbers were much lower after we put the filter in. We don't live in DC but when we visit my parents in Potomac we don't drink their water from the tap because it tastes gross.

If we're out I may buy bottled water if I have to and I don't sweat it.

I get it that all those bottles is a huge amount of environmental pollution, but in terms of water quality, do you think buying spring water or mineral water would be better than drinking filtered tap?

I went through a phase when I drank a lot of Pelligrino. Now I have a ZeroWater filter and a soda stream.

Only drink bottled water. I don't trust local water utility and infrastructure. Important for people to look up water quality reports from local water company and not all local water supply can be relied upon. Mine is not quite flint yet but the report is bad enough that I don't have the peace of mind to drink out of the tap.

Only buy it when traveling.

My family will buy bottled sparkling water on a fairly regular basis - maybe getting 2/3 liters a week. They cost less than a euro a piece (we live in Europe) so I don't think it's a huge deal.

For drinking water we use a Brita pitcher. We are HUGE water drinkers and I can't imagine buying still water for us. We'd be broke!

We drink 95% filtered water. We bring water bottles most places, but don't bring water bottles when traveling or going to amusement parks. For those trips (maybe 3-4 x /year) we'll bring bottled water, consume and dump the empty bottle. At a small handful of bottles a year, I'm not concerned at all about my contribution to plastic waste.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I only drink bottled water. Live in a really old building in DC. Who knows how much lead is in the pipes and the water supply. One of those things which I'm paranoid about.

But a filter, they can filter out lead too...

Depending on the kind of pipes/lead, filters are ineffective.

Anonymous wrote:Does your family buy bottled water on a regular basis, or do you make do with filters? I find that the cost of bottled water adds up over time and it is not a guarantee that bottled water is better than filtered tap water. So my question is really about whether bottled water is part of your food budget.

I only drink bottled water, even bringing it to restaurants. I went through chemotherapy and had to keep things as sanitary as possible, besides which I wanted only filtered water during that time. To this day, I drink 4-5 bottles of purified water (Wellsley Farms from BJ's) every day. One case is $3 for 40 bottles, so that's less than $3/week. I don't really include that as a separate line item in my food budget.

Sometimes my kids grab a bottle, but typically they drink tap water.

Anonymous wrote:I only drink bottled water. Live in a really old building in DC. Who knows how much lead is in the pipes and the water supply. One of those things which I'm paranoid about.

But a filter, they can filter out lead too...