Filtered Water

Awhile back, I installed a Brita filter on my kitchen faucet. I did this because my veterinarian said that she was seeing a lot of urinary tract problems in cats and dogs. These cats and dogs are being fed different diets and live in many different homes. She was wondering if it was something with the town water.

The water definitely did taste better with the filter (it removed all the chlorine, amongst other things) and the cats were happy. Several days ago, I came home from work, turned on the faucet, and the water filter fell apart. I couldn't fix it. As it was nearly ten o'clock at night, I couldn't replace it. Boy, did we notice a huge difference! The unfiltered water is very slightly off-coloured and tastes awful. I noticed the cats would drink from the fountain I made (it was filtering) but not the dishes. Since I replaced the faucet filter, everyone is back to drinking from all dishes again.

Eww! Apparently Toronto area water is relatively clean because even the tap water is run through filters, and especially because it's a large area with a high population, it's a bigger deal. Regardless, we have a Brita filter on our tap as well and I boil water before I drink it.

The colour comes out fine here, but I notice a distinct difference in taste between here and where my family and boyfriend's family live (my parents still filter their water anyway, boyfriend's parents serve water from the tap, they live about 20 minutes apart and I can taste the difference). I get stomach aches from tap water, so I use boiled or filtered water for everything, even though our cats don't really drink water anymore. I use boiled water to water down their food.

My father lives in the city and his tap water tastes fine. Ours is rather gross. I didn't notice until I started filtering it, though, and had the filter break. Its funny what you can get used to.

i prefer the pur water filter

I have a water 'bar' with hot, cold and tepid filtered water. I have never been able to drink plain tap water. Not here and not in England either.

I think filtered water is a good idea for the cats.  I've been doing that for years.  I filter the water I drink and use to make ice as well, although we don't typically filter the water before cooking.  More economical than bottled.  After so many years of not drinking straight tap I can really taste the chlorine and such that's in the unfiltered tap water.

I've been using Pur faucet mounts.  The filter housings are unfortunately not made for the long haul (or haven't been, we'll see how the latest designs do), but the filtering of the 3-stage Pur (now called Mineral Clear) is really top notch for the price and ease of installation, even if you have to replace the housing every couple years or so.

Also if you use a fountain for the cat(s) you can probably forgo the fountain's charcoal filters if you filter the tap water.  Drinkwell expressly says the charcoal filter is optional, at least on the model I've used.

The Brita faucet mount wasn't as durable as I'd hoped either, but we'll see how this one does.

Its a home-made fountain with an Aqua Clear filter on it, so it might be a bit different.

I have a reverse osmosis machine under my sink. It makes about 2 gallons of water per day and I cook with it, make ice cubes, coffee, tea, dilute frozen juice concentrates and drink only this water. The cats get it too in their fountain which is easier to clean as it does not get the hard white crusts from calcium in it. You can rent a machine or buy one (it's expensive {about $1,000 or more from Culligan} but will last practically forever, if you move you can take it with you). Reverse osmosis takes almost everything out of the water (chlorine, heavy metals, calcium in every form which puts white stuff in your tea kettle, chloramines which will kill aquarium fish etc) and is cheaper than bottled water and does not impact the environment like bottles do. The only water that has less stuff in it is distilled water and that tastes flat as it has no minerals in it at all, it is just H2O.    

We double filter our drinking water.  We have a PUR on the faucet, and a Brita pitcher.  We run the water through the PUR faucet into the Brita pitcher and use that for drinking.  For cooking and the plants, I just run it through the PUR faucet.  Our water is high mineral, and has a lot of excess jet fuel byproducts from the 2 very large airports (one military).... so. 

I definitely notice the difference between plain faucet water and filtered.  I don't bother with bottled water, though... plastics, meh.