I am the Dish Washer in Chief in our household. Now that I have a couple months’ worth of dish washing experience in San Francisco, I can safely say that it’s much easier to wash dishes in San Francisco, compared to San Jose. Maybe it has something to do with water hardness? In San Jose I used to use lots of detergent and still the grease doesn’t wash away easily. In SF I don’t need to use much detergent. Rinse them under the tap and off the grease goes.
There is no mineral residues anywhere in my SF house too. And we don’t bother using the water filters any more.
It seems SF water is “better” than SJ water. Nobody has tap water quality in their house shopping criteria (unless you are in Flint, Michigan) but I think it’s not nothing. Unless you are hardcore and have a whole house water filtering system, what you get from the tap is usually all you’ll ever get.
You did know that SF water, from the tap, has been consistently top rated right for a long time? Come on, with those home prices, we BETTER have great water. That is the only thing we can afford to drink…
I would still recommend a water filter though, especially for the water your drink. You never know when some idiot is going dump 10x the fluoride in by accident and the city just doesn’t bother to mention it until after you drank it. In RWC we also had a guy who pumped thousands of gallons of water from his well into the city system.
Yes, as a thin, free daily rag with mostly left leaning writers. It is not the great newspaper it once was, the afternoon paper to the morning Chronicle.
Agreed. I recently had a plumber clean out my tankless water system and while I was watching him do it he showed me the internal filter and it was full of gunk. We are talking about maybe 5 years min though since the last cleaning but still. We ran a couple of gallons of vinegar through the entire system to flush it clean.
I grew up in SF. I am used to SF tap water. It is clean and taste great. But it is acquired taste as some don’t like it.
Then I lived in SJ. The water is hard (calcium carbonate). This is not the mineral that is good for you. There are limescale deposits on the faucet and pipes over time. Glass get cloudy because they are etched by the hard water. Imagine what that water does in your body if you do drink the tap.
Now I live in peninsula city that gets water from SF. It’s much easier to wash dishes and clean the faucets. However, we are used to filtered and bottled water, so we don’t drink directly from tap.
I think every city has different agreements on where they get their water from. We briefly rented an apartment in Sunnyvale and it had the best tasting water.
Yeah, I think it depends on where the water comes from, not necessary SF to SJ difference. SF water comes from Hetch Hetchy; I assume mainly melted snow. SJ has 3 water districts. I believe most of the water is from well (underground water); not sure though.
RWC’s water isn’t hard. Neither is Mountain View’s, but when we were in an apartment building there, it was brown. People say HH water is the cleanest ever, but somehow by the time it reaches the tap, it is quite brown… Maybe it’s the pipes.
It depends on what area of San Jose you are in. If you get your water from San Jose water company it is hard water. If you get it from the city of San Jose it is pretty good quality. I think it is mostly from hetch hetchy…West and South San jose is a combination of local reservoirs and underground aquifers and is very hard water.
