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Amateur mythbusting on hot tap water
Feb. 3rd, 2008 04:20 pmI've heard from a lot of people (mother, friends, various news sites) that hot tap water should not be used for cooking because the hot tap water shakes loose metal and other buildup from the pipes as it travels through them.
I was recently in a hardware store and saw they were selling a home water test kit. The test kit contained two sets of test strips, so I decided to put this theory to the test by testing hot and cold tap water and comparing the results. If the hot tap water is picking up metals, I ought to see it.
Here's what came out:
Iron and copper levels were negligible in both cases. It looks like the hot water didn't have any extra iron or copper in it.
Everything else was just about the same (nitrates, nitrites, hardness, chlorine). pH of the hot water was slightly higher.
Is the myth busted? Maybe. My experiment had some flaws. I also did not test lead, which is the one people are most concerned about.
On a vaguely related tangent, I think someone ought to re-edit all the mythbusters episodes down to 90 seconds each so that you could watch everything they've ever tried in just a couple of hours. The show is cool, but there's a lot of fluff in there in order to fill the TV time block. See, it works on Steve Jobs's MacWorld keynote: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yz1-cPx0cIk
I was recently in a hardware store and saw they were selling a home water test kit. The test kit contained two sets of test strips, so I decided to put this theory to the test by testing hot and cold tap water and comparing the results. If the hot tap water is picking up metals, I ought to see it.
Here's what came out:
Iron and copper levels were negligible in both cases. It looks like the hot water didn't have any extra iron or copper in it.
Everything else was just about the same (nitrates, nitrites, hardness, chlorine). pH of the hot water was slightly higher.
Is the myth busted? Maybe. My experiment had some flaws. I also did not test lead, which is the one people are most concerned about.
On a vaguely related tangent, I think someone ought to re-edit all the mythbusters episodes down to 90 seconds each so that you could watch everything they've ever tried in just a couple of hours. The show is cool, but there's a lot of fluff in there in order to fill the TV time block. See, it works on Steve Jobs's MacWorld keynote: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yz1-cPx0cIk
