It seems like you would get pretty nasty germs happily living in our plumbing (especially untreated well water).
I think about the water that can sit for prolonged periods in hot water tanks, stagnant water in dead end sections of the plumbing system (unused outside faucet etc), and the wet oxygen rich environment inside the faucet ends.
Yet you almost never hear about people getting sick from their water🤷🏽♂️
In: 1670
Well, for starters tap water is treated with chlorine or chloramine which acts as a disinfectant, killing most bacteria, mold, and anything else in the pipes. Chlorine evaporates quickly, but in the pipes there’s nowhere for it to go so it sticks around. Chloramine stays in the water even longer and is used for longer pipelines.
Second, there’s rarely anything for bacteria to feed off of. The water comes out of a treatment center as more or less sterile and pure. Although there are opportunities for bacteria to get in (don’t look up the insides of water towers – generally clean, but sometimes… not so much), the water remains mostly very clean and pure unless there’s something very wrong and that means there’s nothing to sustain or grow bacteria even if the chlorine wasn’t killing it.
Your water heater is (generally) hot enough and pressured enough to prevent bacteria from growing. Note that this is only true for sealed water heaters. Older style open heaters are *not* safe for consuming the water which is why sinks with a separate tap for hot and cold are common in older homes that may not have been updated, typically in Europe.
At the end of the day, though, tap water is *not* sterile. There’s a reason you’re supposed to boil water before using it for something like a Neti pot, where you pour water through your sinuses. Despite that, the bacteria level is kept very low, and most of what we do with water doesn’t need to be perfectly sterile. Even drinking water straight from the tap is safe because the few pathogens capable of surviving through the water system aren’t going to survive going through your stomach and your immune system (again, unless something is very wrong with the water system). It’s only doing something like flushing the water directly through your vulnerable sinuses that it really becomes dangerous. Pathogens that historically infect water systems, like giardia or cholera do not survive the purification process, aren’t introduced (because we keep our sewers and drinking water separate), and can’t survive the chlorine to get to us.
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