There are a few essential things that you and your family need in your daily life. This includes things like food, shelter, and, more to the point here, access to clean water.
Without clean water, it’s difficult if not impossible to meet your basic needs like staying properly hydrated, looking after your own hygiene, or even cleaning up around the house. Ensuring that you have the clean water max flow for your family is especially crucial now when public health concerns are at their height. This resource will help explain why clean water is important and how you can get clean water in your own home.
You Can’t Clean Well with Contaminated Water
The first issue with cleaning with contaminated water is that if you clean a surface with water that isn’t pure enough to be considered clean, you aren’t really cleaning it. It can be helpful to consider this in an extreme way. If water was contaminated with something obvious and easy-to-see such as being muddy, you’d only make a bigger mess trying to clean your kitchen with it.
The same principle goes for water that has “hidden” or even microscopic contaminants. When you’re cleaning something with this type of water, you’re just spreading those contaminants around the home rather than removing any messes that you might be afraid of causing a problem.
Water Softeners, Hard Water, and Cleaning a Home
We’ll take a longer look later at what you can do to improve the water in your home and expand access to safe water. Yet, one idea that’s worth looking into is the concept of hard water.
Hard water is defined by water that features a high mineral content. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, this includes water that features a high volume of dissolved calcium and magnesium. While this is generally easy to address with the help of a water softener system, it does make a difference if it’s left unchecked.
Personally, you might feel hard water when you wash your hands but they still feel a little grimy or even slimy. You can even notice the effects on the cleanliness of certain items in your home. When using hard water, your glassware won’t stay as crystal clear when you wash the dishes, you might notice hard water stains in your shower, and even your plumbing can suffer for it. All in all, it’s worth it to invest in a water softener that will protect your home and family members in a variety of ways.
Personal Hygeine and Clean Water
Closely related to the concerns of cleaning with properly filtered water, clean drinking water is so important because you need the hydration. On top of that, contaminated water may include compounds or even living things within it that are potentially detrimental to introduce to the human body.
The same goes for water that you’re introducing to your body for hygeinic purposes. For instance, you may not be drinking the water that you use to brush your teeth but you’re still introducing it to your body. Thus, it is crucial to ensure that you have access to clean water not only for the sake of your home’s cleanliness, but for your personal hygeine as well.
This is a particularly important during the global health crisis of COVID-19 as well. The CDC recommends washing your hands frequently with clean, running water and soap for at least 20 full seconds – about the length of singing “Happy Birthday.” You should even finish the process by rinsing your hands with more, clean, running water. Sadly, this basic measure is hard to attain if you don’t have access to reliable and clean running water.
How Can You Access Clean Water?
Unfortunately, many people don’t have access to the clean water that they need. According to the Centers for Disease Control, more than 35% of people worldwide, which measures out to about 2.5 billion people, don’t have the access to improved sanitation that they need. This is largely linked to the fact that approximately 780 million people don’t have access to improved water sources, also according to the CDC.
There are plenty of organizations working to bring clean water to areas that need it. However, what can you do in your own home to access clean water?
The most common piece of advice is to access pre-distilled water. For instance, making sure to buy bottled water for the home. Yet, this is often an expensive endeavor and, in some cases, families can benefit from trying to improve the running water that’s already present in their home. You can do this by installing a water softener or water filtration system in your home to remove hard minerals and any contaminants that might adversely affect the quality of the water.
