Leading a healthy lifestyle is all about making the right decisions. Does your diet include a good balance of fruits, vegetables, grains, meats, and dairy? Are you exercising regularly to keep your heart and other muscles active? Do you engage in activities you enjoy to promote better mental health?
Another factor that can affect your health is how much water you drink. Doctors recommend that each individual drinks half an ounce to an ounce of water per pound of body weight. Most people do not drink enough water to keep their cells and skin sufficiently nourished.
While drinking plenty of water is a good thing, there are times when it can be detrimental to your health. If your water is not pure, then you might be exposing yourself to harmful contaminants that can cause diseases or other health issues. This is why testing your water is an important practice to adopt.
What Are You Testing For?
Why bother testing the water in your home or business? Primarily to detect contaminants that do not belong there and could harm your health. There are many common contaminants that may be in your water for various reasons. Arsenic, cadmium, and mercury are a common culprit that can cause adverse health effects. In the past, substances like trichloroethylene and benzene have been found in places like Camp LeJeune, a marine base located in North Carolina. This particular contamination resulted in ongoing lawsuits where victims contacted Camp Lejeune attorneys due to an illness suffered from the contaminated water.
Testing your own water can check for other common materials like iron, chlorine, herbicides, lead, and more.
How to Test Your Water
To keep your family safe, it is important to test your water frequently. Those who live in more populated areas may want to do so because of nearby industrial properties or overwhelmed waste management facilities. If you live out in the country, especially near farmland, then you could face other threats like pesticides, herbicides, or other volatile organic chemicals. There are three primary ways to test your water.
Home Testing Kit
The easiest and cheapest way to have your water tested is to purchase a home testing kit. There are many of these products on the market, and some are more effective than others. While these kits can catch most of the common contaminants, they often have to be at higher concentrations to be detected.
That means you may be exposed to small amounts of contaminants even if the testing kit did not reveal any substantial amounts of known chemicals.
Hiring a Professional
If you really want to protect the purity of your water, then it makes more sense to hire a professional service to test your water. These firms have access to better testing methods than a home kit can provide. Even if there are low levels of a certain chemical that a home kit would miss, the testing methods of a professional service would be more likely to pick that up. It is recommended that water is tested in the spring or summer.
Send a Test to the Town or City
In many municipalities, the local water treatment facility will send out water test kits for you to use. In most cases, you will collect samples of your water and then send them into the facility to be tested for various chemicals. Again, this is a far better way to determine if your water is pure since the testing resources this facility has will be more effective than a home testing kit. The only downside is that these tests are at the behest of your local municipality, and they may not request testing for long periods. If you are worried about your water quality for whatever reason, you can hire a professional or do a home test for some peace of mind.
The Consequences of Impure Water Can Be Severe
Drinking clean water is not just a smart decision, but it is a necessity. Chemicals in your water can be life-threatening in some cases. In others, they could cause debilitating diseases or health conditions. The risk of not testing your water is too great to ignore this potential issue. Common water-related issues include diarrhea, dysentery, giardiasis, typhoid fever, E. coli, and salmonellosis. You could also experience severe problems in your gastrointestinal, reproductive, or neurological systems. Cancer can also be the result of drinking contaminated water.
At the end of the day, it is better to be safe than sorry. If your local water treatment plant does not send out tests, then you should consider taking matters into your own hands. The consequences of doing nothing could be life-threatening to you and your family.
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