This post is a cautionary tale, and a snapshot of all the relevant information I gathered in the process. It so happened that one day I get a phone call from a company "that deals with water quality", and they claim that Cathy has done a survey with them, and has won some prize worth over $xxx (as a "thank you"). They wanted to know whether they can swing by sometime, drop it off, and do a free water test for us. As Cathy wasn't home, I couldn't check with her whether this was legitimate, so I said, what the hey, come on over. I was interested in the water test because I was wondering earlier whether we were suffering from excessive hardness of water here, but that's another story.
6:30pm, the representative shows up. Sets up in the kitchen a row of plastic drinking cups, as if preparing for an elaborate shell game. Each cup is made to hold water from various sources (distilled, tap, Brita filtered, and various bottled waters in our house). He pulls out an upright binder with what seems like "informational material". Oh oh, red flags start going off in my head!
First test is using a TDS (Total Dissolved Solids) meter. Distilled water obviously gets a very low reading. Tap water is higher. The readings for bottled water shoot up to 265. The "gentleman" claims that this reflects the amount of junk and pollutants in the water. In actuality, this is totally misleading. See
here for a full skinny on TDS measurement. It's a bit of a misnomer, all it really does is detect charged ions in water, most of which are from the (benign, or even beneficial) hard water salts dissolved in the water (Calcium, etc.) The 265 p.p.m. figure for the bottled water was meant to impress and frighten us, but inspecting the label for the bottled waters in fact explicitly states that the expected mineral content in the waters is about 290 p.p.m., so if anything, the TDS reading for these waters was in fact a tad low.
I had a pretty strong sinking feeling at this point, that we've been conned into a sales pitch. The final touch was when the guy pulled out a precipitator test device for next round of testing. I've heard of these being used for scaremongering, and a quick check on the Net (I excused myself to grab my tea from upstairs) revealed to be the case, and also turned up this interesting
tidbit (government forbade this particular company to do chlorine testing without getting certified; I presume they were scaring residents with yet more deceptive tests).
Anyhow, in short, the company was
Glacier Water Treatment Systems of Newmarket, Ontario. They sell water distillers for homes.
Links explaining the bogus nature of the precipitator test:
It's been suggested that drinking distilled water for long durations is bad for you: long-term deficit in mineral intake causes the body to use its own stores to achieve the same concentration in the distilled water. Here are some links:
Incidentally, an interesting way to expose the invalidness of a precipitator test is to throw some table salt into the container with distilled water, the one which is apparently so pure and good and wholesome, and see it start generating the same type of ugly, discusting gunk and scum as the rest. The salt creates charged ions in the water, which make it conductive like the others, and thus the spectacle can then go on.
