Mom’s Money

How Much Money Are You Wasting On Bottled Water?

We live in an area where the water that comes out of our faucet doesn’t taste so great and the quality has been questioned.  Apparently, we are not alone.  The bottled water industry has grown by leaps and bounds over the last several years with good reason.  If you check the water quality reports in a lot of municipalities there are reasons why you won’t be too quick to drink water right out of the faucet.  This being said, there are debates raging about whether the bottled water you are purchasing is, in fact, cleaner or safer than tap water.  However, that discussion will go on for quite some time and regardless of whether or not it’s actually safer than your tap water isn’t exactly the point.  You, like many others, are drinking bottled water because you like the taste better than your tap water, and bottled water is  convenient.

But, here is where I think I can win the argument for “filtered” tap water versus bottled water.  Let me emphasis that I’m talking about filtering your tap water here as opposed to buying bottled water to drink.  I don’t agree with the proponents of municipal tap water systems saying our tap water is just fine without filtering it.  I’ve done my own taste tests in my own home and the filtered water wins my vote.  So, that said, where’s the money savings angle in this?

Put simply, if you are lugging home cases of bottled water, you are spending a huge amount of money that you don’t have to spend to get good tasting drinking water.  Here’s how it calculates, roughly:

For individual 16 oz bottles of water, you are paying around $1.25 per gallon.  Not to mention the harm you’re doing to our environment and health with all those plastic bottles filling our landfills.  Even if you recycle, it takes energy to recycle those bottles when they didn’t have to be manufactured in the first place.

For faucet filtered drinking water, you would be paying around $0.30 per gallon.  The faucet attachment is an initial expense of about $25.00, but taking that into consideration, it only adds a few cents to the  expense of your drinking water over the lifetime of the faucet attachment.  And there are no mountains of plastic bottles floating out to sea from our overflowing landfills.

One last point, because I believe in filtering our water at the faucet in order to have clean, good tasting water, I filter all my cooking water, as well.  Why should my potatoes boil in water that I don’t think is good enough to drink?  Can you imagine opening bottles of drinking water and pouring it into a pot every time you make vegetables for supper?  Consider your coffee and tea, too.  That’s why I did the math, because I can’t afford to spend $1.25 for every gallon of water I consume, can you?