For me, it’s an electric toothbrush. It doesn’t matter if you go with Sonicare or Oral-B, once you start using an electric toothbrush, regular toothbrushes don’t ever feel like they clean your teeth properly. The smooth plaque-free top layer of your teeth that you can feel after using an electric toothbrush can’t be replicated with a regular toothbrush.
A small countertop water cooler/dispenser with a refillable filter bottle on top. (if you have the floor space, a stand up cooler is usually more energy efficient tho)
Something like this:
With one of these on top: https://www.zerowater.com/products/filtered-water-cooler
Clean filtered water, both boiling hot and almost ice cold, on-demand. Filling water bottles, cups, making hot chocolate, tea, instant noodles, even just starting to boil a pot using pre-heated water, taking so much less time. I love this thing.
When it comes to filters:
Zerowaters products specifically come with a Total Disolved Solids meter measuring in parts-per-million.
I was previously using a Brita filter jug which poured into a second filter from Aquapur ontop of my cooler.
My Tap water: 143ppm
Brita filter: 139ppm
Brita+Second filter: 87ppm
Replaced both with a single zerowater filter: 0ppm
After pulling close to 30 gallons through that filter its risen to ~8ppm (they want you to replace it at >6)
Project farm testing water filters.
Why would I care about trace minerals in drinking water though? Just want the chlorine taste removed and activated carbon filters seems to do that just fine.
It’s not just trace minerals in drinking water, but lead, mercury, chromium, micro plastics, and chemicals like chlorine, fluorine, and PFOA/PFOS.
All of these, zerowater filters are certified and tested to greatly reduce if not totally remove. I’ve noticed a significant improvement in taste, and the chemical testing I’ve personally done shows far better results than what I get from the tap. I highly recommend watching that ProjectFarm video I linked, and getting some testing kits for your own water.
My area is regularly on a boil-water notice because of poorly managed water treatment and damaged or changing piping during heavy development (at least 6 separate times in the last 5 years). We’re not currently on such a notice, but the water we receive still isnt great.
My sister is immunocompromised due to illness and the medications required to fight it. She can’t safely drink straight tap water, but this has been much much better for her.
Clearly I live somewhere with better water regulations, never even heard of a boil water notice
It just means water quality in the area is below the normal standard, so residents are advised to boil their tap water before consumption for a short time (usually a few days, maybe a week).
It’s never possible to guarantee 100% uptime in any system (especially something as large as a city wide water supply, underground piping and all), there will always be failures/disruptions. You can plan for a lot, and make tons of redundancy, but eventually something WILL fail.
When it comes to water treatment, those failures/disruptions mean contamination and that means flushing as much as you can out and telling consumers within the affected area to boil their water for a short time. That can be anything from the various processes within the treatment system itself failing, to simple damage to supply piping introducing dirt and other contaminants, or even just planned maintenance/additions/upgrades.
Where I currently live it’s bit ridiculous how many times we’ve had such conditions, but I’ve also lived places for years and never had an issue. It happens everywhere eventually (as long as your government doesn’t suck and actually bothers to tell you about it), but you may never even notice.
Maybe you’ve been lucky enough to have never had such a disruption, maybe you didn’t notice the warnings/communications about it, maybe they just didn’t bother to tell you and hoped it wouldn’t be a noticeable issue.
When there is a water outage here it is normally localised to a small area and makes national news because of how infrequent it is. The water company must provide bottled water when this happens too.
That’s usually down to the scale of the outage. Knock out half a city and yeah, the news is interested and water gets supplied via alternatives (bottles, localized fill stations, etc); one pipe supplying a neighbourhood bursts due to slow ground movement over time, nobody but that neighbourhood cares… I’ve experienced both.
My current issues are because a very small native government is managing treatment in our area, the systems are in desperate need of updating, and there’s been a ton of expansion (new housing) added on, so they’re struggling to cope. (this has been very unusual in my experience)
I’ve also lived in a completely different country where the water was very well managed. I walked out my front door after loosing water pressure one day and there was a new fountain of water pouring out of the middle of the street because the main line running under it broke, creating a sink hole and introducing contaminants to the now open pipe.
Similar to a power outage; a whole city loses power and you get national news articles about it, 1 house loses power and even the smallest local news doesn’t really care as long as it’s fixed relatively quickly.
/edit: well would you look at that. Woke up this morning; no water pressure. Pipe burt in the apartment building beside us, they had to turn off water to the whole lot (which includes me) to fix it. We’re probably going to have to boil water for a day or so for extra caution.
This! But mine is just a pitcher with a filter in the lid. Stick it in the fridge to keep cool, use it to fill backup bottles.
I started with one of those for at least a decade and upgraded to a large dispenser jug in the fridge for like 4 years.
The small pitcher doesn’t hold enough water needing a refill pretty much every use (large water bottles, and several family members). Refilling means setting it in the sink, add water, wait long enough for it to filter the first batch, then add more and return it to the fridge. Takes too long.
The large dispenser jug was a PITA to take out, filter water into (using the top of the Brita pitcher in like 5 batches), then return to the fridge around twice a week, if not more. It’s heavy, that process takes a while, and you’ve gotta babysit it to add enough water and put it away to be chilled.
The countertop cooler filter is much more convenient. It holds ~5 gallons of filtered water and you can dump like 3.5-4 gallons into the top at a time. Takes like 1/5th the time to refill with no babysitting/waiting around to add more water.
The major upgrade there is the hot filteted water. It is SO nice being able to get boiling hot filtered water immediately. I really like hot chocolate, my sister drinks a ton of tea, and we all like instant cup-a-noodles. Never wait for a kettle, and cleaner water than the kettle.