Tap water boiled + filtered 3 days ago vs. nightly - which is healthier + does it really matter?!
Answers: My live-in girlfriend and I had a big argument over water. She wants me to boil and filter water nightly as opposed to having a couple of containers to store water that has been boiled and filtered. My reasoning is that having boiled and filtered water (maybe 2 days ago) stored in containers does not make a difference but is convenient. However, she feels that it is not "healthy" and is not afraid to be vocal with it. Can anyone please comment on this issue? Thank you.
If you are refrigerating the water, that should not be a problem, but even boiled & filtered water will allow bacterial growth at room temperature, and two or three days is plenty of time to grow plenty of bacteria. I wouldn't personally go past three days in the refrigerator, myself. We also keep tap water chilled, and if we don't drink it in two days, I dump it, put the container through the dishwasher, and start with fresh.
You know, even ice allows bacterial growth. If you've ever worked in food service, you know that any ice not used is melted down at the end of each day and the ice bin cleaned and sanitized.
Your girlfriend's instincts are right on this one. Better safe than sorry.
Just wondering: Is your tap water unsafe to drink? Or is the boiling and filtering some naturalistic idea you've come up with? Usually tap water has been treated with chlorine to kill the kind of bacteria that will grow in the boiled and filtered water you are letting sit for a couple of days. Kind of full-circle irony, and unclear to me what benefit you think you are getting, unless your water is not drinkable from the tap without this process. You are also not getting fluoride, which was added about 50 years ago to urban water supplies for bone & tooth health. I have read recently that the incidence of cavities has gone up in first-world countries, since people began shunning tap water for bottled water, which doesn't contain fluoride.
You're wasting your life doing that. It's from the city...it's already clean.
