Have you ever thought of collecting rain water for drinking? Is it a viable alternative to man-made poisons?

Question

City tap water has bleach, chemicals and drugs from p**p. Country water has p**p. Bottled water has plactic chemicals that many say is worse that city water.

Answer 1

You've got to be careful how you collect it.  If you collect water from a downspout that gives you water that has run down a roof, that will pick up all kinds of contaminants.  

By itself, rainwater will be varying degrees of acid, from the carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, sulfuric acid and nitric acid that are found in most industrial air pollution and car exhaust.  These aren't necessarily toxic, it depends on amounts.  They aren't good for you either.  Raindrops form around "condensation nuclei"-- small particulate matter found in the air.  Once this was all natural dust or sea salt.  Today it is also mostly pollution.  Often that means soot, but it can be other things, some quite toxic.  Putting it through a filter should remove most of these things.  The kind with an activated charcoal stage would be helpful.

I noticed you comment about the "chemicals and drugs" in ground water.  Did you know the drugs and growth hormones can now be found in deep sea fish, caught at great depths?  You're not going to get away from that stuff anywhere, so again, a filter is a darned good idea, no matter what your water source.

Answer 2

In most of the Bahamas islands, that is all they have.   I guess some of the larger places now have desalination plants, but friends there still collect it off their roof and channel it into a large cistern.

Answer 3

Its called rainwater harvesting.

Check out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainwater_h...

Its catching up in a lot of areas where freshwater is scarce.

Answer 4

I always thought that would be a good idea too, but it's possible that rain could have pollutants in it also. It really depends on what part of the US you live in. If you live in a big city, the rain that falls through the sky/clouds absorbes the pollutants that are in the air. You know, kinda like acid rain..Etc.

But if you live away from the big city, and you wanted to drink collected rain, I guess it'd be okay. Maybe if you had a water filteration you could run it through, just to make sure it'd be safe enough to drink.

Good luck.

- SiLeNcE†Amidst†ChAoS

Answer 5

You'd have to boil it or have a fancy filtration system since rain water is basically evaporated polluted water.  To me this is just a hassle I'll stick with my little Brita filter and my gross tap water and live in happy ingnorance of the gross stuff that's probably in it.