Learn About Your Tap Water

Learn how to read water reports, understand EPA standards, and make informed decisions about your tap water.

41 articles

Deep-dives on specific water contaminants including lead, PFAS, arsenic, and more. Learn about health effects and removal methods.

6 articles

NSF certification explained, filter comparisons, and expert recommendations for removing specific contaminants.

12 articles

City-specific water quality analysis, contamination issues, and local recommendations.

5 articles

Home test kits, certified lab reviews, and guidance on when and how to test your tap water.

1 article

Yes — treated tap water contains micro- and nanoplastics, though bottled water runs about 3× higher by particle count (Hart & Lenhart, 2025). How much is genuinely uncertain, the WHO calls it low concern at current levels, and the human health evidence is association, not proof. It's not on your CCR because there's no federal standard — only California even measures it — and reverse osmosis removes essentially all of it.

A reverse osmosis membrane (~0.0001 µm) is thousands of times finer than the smallest microplastic, so it removes essentially all of them. Sub-micron carbon block (0.5–1 µm) captures nearly all; standard loose-media pitchers miss the smallest particles; boiling removes none. The honest catch: microplastics reduction can be certified under NSF/ANSI 401, but very few filters carry it — most 'removes microplastics' claims are manufacturer testing.

A $30 box of strips tells you if something's obviously off in a minute; a certified lab tells you exactly what and how much. Strips reliably screen chlorine, hardness, and pH — but lead, PFAS, arsenic, and bacteria are lab-only, and a strip that reads 'safe' on a lead-laced tap is just false confidence.

Disinfection byproducts are the chemical tradeoff of safe water. The EPA regulates four families — led by trihalomethanes at 80 µg/L — and the health risk is real but modest, most of it comes from showering, and a standard Brita doesn't remove them.

For most US households, bottled water is not safer than tap. On the two measures that protect drinkers—testing frequency and transparency—tap is the more rigorously overseen of the two, at about $0.003 a gallon versus hundreds of times that for bottled.

A salt-free water softener does not actually soften water. It uses template-assisted crystallization (TAC) to convert dissolved calcium and magnesium into stable microscopic crystals that resist forming scale, while the hardness stays in the water.