Not all water is created equal. A little contamination can wildly effect how safe water is to drink, and many people fail to realize this. It's important to protect against these possible pollutants, but before any steps such as filtration or softening can be taken, we need to know that the water is unsafe.
Once we know the water is unsafe, all are problems are not solved.
Many kinds of chemicals that are found in untreated water contribute to many kinds of illnesses. Many of these chemicals are not treated for, so it is important to figure out if these dangerous substances have made their home in your water.
Testing water is no simple business. A lot of the things we can test for don't directly lead to it being dangerous or safe, so it's only useful to test water if we can draw conclusions from it. Many of the things we can directly test, such as temperature, or chemical makeup, only give us hints as to how bad or good it will serve as drinking water. Color, taste, odor, and particles all some of the things we can test in a lab, and they let us know if the water is safe to drink, or worth treating further so that it will ultimately be fit for consumption. We can look at these characteristics and tests to see how we ascertain water quality.
When water tastes bad, you usually have the origin of the water to blame. Generally speaking, bad tastes make their way into the water where they first originate, such as a spring or reservoir. These tastes are not usually picked up in the process of bring the water to your tap. Organic tastes are generally the product of organic processes, and while these tastes wont seriously hurt you, and aren't a real threat to your health, they can be seriously unpleasant, and they often mean there are deeper issues with the water supply. There is a chance these tastes could come from bacteria, which would mean the water would have to be sanitized before it became fit for consumption.
It can be hard to test tastes on an objective scale. It's easy to check out what the chemical composition of a sample is, but it's hard to match that to "good tasting" or "bad tasting." The best way to test taste is to figure out: what will the consumer think. If a taste isn't offensive to an actual person, it's good to go.
It's problematic to be aware of exactly what compositions or combos of chemicals will have unintended effects upon the subjective taste of the water, so human testers are usually more useful than chemical lab specs. Testers often use qualitative metrics, or water contamination symptoms to explain the water they taste which can include "swampy, grassy, medicinal, septic, phenolic, musty, fishy, and sweet." These subjective assessments give researches a reliable start line to base further investigation from, and help them know if water is filtered or softened enough to be drinkable by the average citizen.
Smell and taste can be connected because the nerves we use to detect them are also connected. Both smell and taste are sensations caused by nerves that spread from the brain to the upper soft palate. Because of this, a lot of the methods we use to test for taste apply to smell as well. That being said, there are some differences.
One difference between taste and smell is chemical source. While a strange taste could come from a presence of inorganic minerals or sediment, smell is almost always the product of organic matter. This could be algae, bacteria, or plant matter, but it is almost always something that was alive at one point. Even if the smell made its way into the water en route to the tap, it was some contamination of living organic matter.
Of course, just like taste, it is hard to pin down smell with quantitative data. It is much easier to used test subjects to help determine an "odor threshold", or the point at which smell becomes noticeable and unpleasant.
It's important to test water for smell with a large group of testers. From a statistical point of view, a small sample of smell testers wont produce a very reliable result. Peoples' smell preferences and sensibilities vary from day to day an person to person, so it is also helpful to have testers test the water several times on different days. This can take out a lot of unwanted confounding variation.
If the consumer turns on the tap and gets a shower of unclear liquid, regardless of the safety or contamination of the water, they're going to be quite uncomfortable. Discoloration in water can suggest seriously deeper issues, but even if it didn't, it would still pose a problem for drinkers because of the psychological ramifications of drinking cloudy water. Coloration can come from a number of sources such as algae, runoff pesticide, or silt.
These conditions commonly are not outright poisonous, but just might be unhealthy when it comes to the drinker, and shall certainly manifest their unique presence through unacceptable odor, taste, or acidity. If these natural conditions are known to not add to water discoloration, or otherwise considered to not exist, industrial waster or any other man made problems such as runoff pesticide may very well be the culprit.
Color is normally measured as "true color" (this means many of the insoluble pieces of the water have been removed), and "apparent color," color the ultimate user would see whenever they needed to access the water source without first running it via sediment filter. These colors and the corresponding water contamination effects are tested against several predetermined pigment values, much of which are declared as decent enough for consumption, and many of which typically are not.
So you know a little about how water is tested, but how does this affect your life?
So water is tested using a slew of metrics, simply what does this mean for you? Well for starters, test your water quality. You're whole city could be ingesting dangerous or harmful chemicals because not a single person has taken the an opportunity to evaluate the water on these basic metrics. It's your responsibility to your community to make sure the water supply is kept clean and safe to drink.
Once we know the water is unsafe, all are problems are not solved.
Many kinds of chemicals that are found in untreated water contribute to many kinds of illnesses. Many of these chemicals are not treated for, so it is important to figure out if these dangerous substances have made their home in your water.
Testing water is no simple business. A lot of the things we can test for don't directly lead to it being dangerous or safe, so it's only useful to test water if we can draw conclusions from it. Many of the things we can directly test, such as temperature, or chemical makeup, only give us hints as to how bad or good it will serve as drinking water. Color, taste, odor, and particles all some of the things we can test in a lab, and they let us know if the water is safe to drink, or worth treating further so that it will ultimately be fit for consumption. We can look at these characteristics and tests to see how we ascertain water quality.
When water tastes bad, you usually have the origin of the water to blame. Generally speaking, bad tastes make their way into the water where they first originate, such as a spring or reservoir. These tastes are not usually picked up in the process of bring the water to your tap. Organic tastes are generally the product of organic processes, and while these tastes wont seriously hurt you, and aren't a real threat to your health, they can be seriously unpleasant, and they often mean there are deeper issues with the water supply. There is a chance these tastes could come from bacteria, which would mean the water would have to be sanitized before it became fit for consumption.
It can be hard to test tastes on an objective scale. It's easy to check out what the chemical composition of a sample is, but it's hard to match that to "good tasting" or "bad tasting." The best way to test taste is to figure out: what will the consumer think. If a taste isn't offensive to an actual person, it's good to go.
It's problematic to be aware of exactly what compositions or combos of chemicals will have unintended effects upon the subjective taste of the water, so human testers are usually more useful than chemical lab specs. Testers often use qualitative metrics, or water contamination symptoms to explain the water they taste which can include "swampy, grassy, medicinal, septic, phenolic, musty, fishy, and sweet." These subjective assessments give researches a reliable start line to base further investigation from, and help them know if water is filtered or softened enough to be drinkable by the average citizen.
Smell and taste can be connected because the nerves we use to detect them are also connected. Both smell and taste are sensations caused by nerves that spread from the brain to the upper soft palate. Because of this, a lot of the methods we use to test for taste apply to smell as well. That being said, there are some differences.
One difference between taste and smell is chemical source. While a strange taste could come from a presence of inorganic minerals or sediment, smell is almost always the product of organic matter. This could be algae, bacteria, or plant matter, but it is almost always something that was alive at one point. Even if the smell made its way into the water en route to the tap, it was some contamination of living organic matter.
Of course, just like taste, it is hard to pin down smell with quantitative data. It is much easier to used test subjects to help determine an "odor threshold", or the point at which smell becomes noticeable and unpleasant.
It's important to test water for smell with a large group of testers. From a statistical point of view, a small sample of smell testers wont produce a very reliable result. Peoples' smell preferences and sensibilities vary from day to day an person to person, so it is also helpful to have testers test the water several times on different days. This can take out a lot of unwanted confounding variation.
If the consumer turns on the tap and gets a shower of unclear liquid, regardless of the safety or contamination of the water, they're going to be quite uncomfortable. Discoloration in water can suggest seriously deeper issues, but even if it didn't, it would still pose a problem for drinkers because of the psychological ramifications of drinking cloudy water. Coloration can come from a number of sources such as algae, runoff pesticide, or silt.
These conditions commonly are not outright poisonous, but just might be unhealthy when it comes to the drinker, and shall certainly manifest their unique presence through unacceptable odor, taste, or acidity. If these natural conditions are known to not add to water discoloration, or otherwise considered to not exist, industrial waster or any other man made problems such as runoff pesticide may very well be the culprit.
Color is normally measured as "true color" (this means many of the insoluble pieces of the water have been removed), and "apparent color," color the ultimate user would see whenever they needed to access the water source without first running it via sediment filter. These colors and the corresponding water contamination effects are tested against several predetermined pigment values, much of which are declared as decent enough for consumption, and many of which typically are not.
So you know a little about how water is tested, but how does this affect your life?
So water is tested using a slew of metrics, simply what does this mean for you? Well for starters, test your water quality. You're whole city could be ingesting dangerous or harmful chemicals because not a single person has taken the an opportunity to evaluate the water on these basic metrics. It's your responsibility to your community to make sure the water supply is kept clean and safe to drink.
About the Author:
Click on a link if you're interested in learning more about water cleanlinessor you're interested in going to a site that will teach you how to get rid of harsh chemicals.
No comments:
Post a Comment