Can Your City Affect Your Water Quality?
Accessible clean drinking water is a necessity. Did you know your city can affect your water quality? Most of us know this instinctively—your tap water has to come from somewhere, right? However, how does your city treat the water, how does it remove contamination, and how does it impact water quality? We’ll answer those questions by examining how your city affects your water quality below.
What Is Municipal Water?
Municipal tap water reaches homes and businesses through underground pipes. Generally, cities chemically treat drinking water using several systems, such as coagulation, sedimentation, filtration, and disinfection. These processes remove major contaminants, and it’s one of the ways your city affects your water quality.
What Are the Steps for Water Treatment?
Coagulation is the first step of any water treatment process, where chemicals with positive charges are displaced within the water. This positive charge neutralizes negative charges within the dirt and dissolved particles. Aluminum, salt, and iron are used in this process.
Flocculation mixes water so that it forms heavier particles called flocs. Additional chemicals are then added to help the flocs form. Sedimentation strips many solids from the water; flocs settle at the bottom of a gigantic mixer during this stage.
Finally, we have filtration. Filtration commences when flocs settle at the bottom of the water—they’re heavier, remember? Clean water floats on top. This water then passes through a filter of various pore sizes. Municipalities make them out of different materials like charcoal, gravel, or sand. These filters remove the bulk of germs. Large dust particles, parasites, bad bacteria, and viruses are filtered out of the water.
What Can Water Treatment Miss in Your Tap Water?
This might sound like a thorough process, but as it turns out, your city can miss quite a bit. Cities don’t perform hard water treatment during their filtration process. This means minerals in the water, like calcium and magnesium, can wreak havoc on your pipes and dry out your hair and skin. The only solution is to have a professional install a water softener. Chemicals and contaminants can also get into your water supply before they even hit your pipes, such as E. coli or even fecal matter. Even if it’s just on your sink, a water filter will help you avoid these contaminants.
We briefly mentioned water softeners in our examination of whether or not cities affect your water. Not only do we sell water softeners and installation services, but we’re also water treatment professionals. Book an appointment at Alamo Water Softeners, and we’ll schedule you today!
