In spite of what most folks think, there are no safe water sources. Roughly 98% of all human life on the planet now carries the bio-accumulator C-8 (it's what makes Teflon & Gore-Tex work) and it never goes away - hence the "bio-accumulator" tag. We've had atrazine in every USGS test well in the US for years, and now Dicamba, Round-Up and more are there and in our food as well, so don't kid yourself that well water is somehow safe because it's coming from deep in the ground. Wells and casings leak, and where they don't, they still provide a capillary path for surface water contaminants (like pesticides, sewage effluent & industrial wastes) to access those supposedly pristine aquifers, to say nothing of the effect of tens of thousands of oil and gas wells (think fracking).
Thanks to the persistence of countless failed private and public sewage treatment facilities, and the good folks at DuPont, 3M, Beyer, BASF, et al, all of our water sources have been impacted. Ironic that companies like DuPont are now making money selling us filters and membranes to remove their industrial pollutants from the contaminated water that they've left behind, but I digress.
As a former USAF SERE Instructor I've drunk water from all sorts of sketchy and disgusting sources, and I've known more than a few people who decided "it looks clean" was clean enough, and they later paid for it dearly. Looks and taste are simply not a measure of safety, and some of the most dangerous Industrial pollutants are completely undetectable by taste, smell or sight, with carcinogenic PFOA's being a prime example.
Just because a public water system claims that they've met the Federal guidelines doesn't mean their water is healthy either. The companies that create the industrial wastes and pesticides that are making us sick spend gobs of money to keep the gutless EPA and FDA off of their back. Matter of fact, they often have their own people appointed to run said agencies (as has been especially true of late), so it's basically the foxes runnin' the hen house on that front.
The vast majority of metropolitan water treatment facilities don't even have the capacity to test for many of the latest exposed serious health threats, like the aforementioned C-8, and the incalculable number of pharmaceutical compounds that pass straight through their systems undetected. They all have issues. If it's not incomplete treatment and filtration, it's their excess sanitizing chemicals that reach your glass , so just as staying Covid free requires you to treat everyone as if they are a carrier, the best way to avoid GI distress (and potentially much worse) is to assume that any and all water that you source has something wrong with it, and treat it accordingly.
It's no better when you're boondocking on the outermost fringe. You can't see E. coli 0157:H7
, nor giardia lamblia, cryptosporidium, liver flukes, or guinea worm larva, and yet they are all out there, often in some of the most pristine
looking, crystal clear waters that you've ever seen. Yes, that stream may well be glacial melt fed, but that doesn't mean there isn't a dead moose rotting in it somewhere upstream as well. Does a bear crap in the woods? Yup, and in the water too, so 'nuf said?
And what do ya suppose waterborne microorganisms love, other than obviously water? More often than not, the very conditions that a typical RV water tank & distribution system provide, especially one that only gets used every few months. So, what to do? Well, the Thor folks' guidance is certainly a simple, but effective, low budget approach, but it doesn't really address all of the possible contaminants that you can potentially encounter, plus it introduces a dangerous chemical compound into my water that I'd sooner do without, even in minute doses.
We resort to an injected oxidizer (ozone) w/ post treatment GAC to absorb any excess O3, graduated 150µ to sub-micron filtration (eg. Doulton RIO-200), reverse osmosis & de-ionization (RODI). With a composting toilet our water needs are much reduced, so 40-60 gallons will go a pretty long way. Even w/ a pressure pump, RO wastes a fair bit of water, so we treat everything as it goes into our tanks, and again as we use it, just w/o the RODI. With stepped sediment filtration ahead of the finer gradation filters you can potentially turn contaminated floodwaters into lab grade dielectric H20 (which then needs a little calcium to help buffer it up to a neutral pH), but that is pretty much where my paranoid OCD butt needs to be in order to relax. I also refuse to pay good money for water that's bottled in plastic future garbage, so becoming my own traveling water treatment plant was unavoidable.
Of course, another solution would be to just do as many of our ancestors did and simply drink beer instead of water.
While the state of our water is unsettling, it's still better to know...
http://psep.cce.cornell.edu/facts-slides-self/facts/pes-heef-grw85.aspx
https://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/hygiene/plumbing3.pdf
https://www.ewg.org/tapwater/
Just my roll of nickels worth.
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