Interesting. Haven’t really heard of that. The city water is comes from wells is what I’ve been told. I know they have to treat it. Usually no chlorine smell, like some places have.
Some of the people have a slight smell of sulphur, but most don’t. I am not sure what causes that. I think it might be their own plumbing, but not sure. Those people buy the gallon jugs of water from the grocery or the big blue jugs from Walmart that have a dispenser tab. Looks to me like they are more than 5 gallon, but can’t remember for sure.
I don’t pay much attention, because we have well water from our own well. I used to have a reverse osmosis system when my Dad was here to use for his coffee and water, as his health was very delicate, but that was abundance of caution. We’ve been drinking it for 40 years. Haven’t tested it recently, but it tested good years back.
It’s city water, which is very hard, and also hard on plumbing. Certified to meet standards, and even just won an “award of excellence”...great on paper, but is poor tasting, etc.
Only water we’ve used that was worse came from the Torrey Pines/Scripps water system: it wouldn’t even discolor, let alone dissolve Lipton InstanT Iced Tea, even when we let a glass sit overnight. It just floated on top, but worked perfectly in bottled water.
Second worst was some “natural mineral springs” water we collected at the spigot provided: it curdled coffee creamer. Sometimes, the city water would also do that, to a lesser degree.
In any case, we won’t use it for drinking or cooking. However, we also can’t afford tossing 3-4 gallons of water down the septic tank, for every good gallon an R/O system produces.