Water

Hi all

Our first cruise, and I read somewhere that the water on the ship is re filtered and reused, the dirty black water is filtered to be drinkable. To counter this figured I would take a couple of bobble filter bottles, is this going to be sufficient or do I need to budget in bottle water costs too.

I don't want to get sick and drink a lot of water.

Any help on this would be appreciated.

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You wont get sick from the water.

Potable water is distilled more than filtered.

That being said, a lot of people DO budget for bottled water. Some carry it on, others buy the water package. it's up to you, you budget, and how much effort you want to carry water from there.

(not saying getting sick is impossible, but it's not going to be DUE to the water that the ship gives you to drink)

We've done 20 cruises on a variety of cruise lines. I simply take a couple of water bottles onboard and then refill them as needed from ship's water.

If filling the bottles in the buffet I use a glass to fill them, never putting them under the water container spigot. That is the best way for not spreading germs.

Drinking ship water, including from ice bucket and from cabin's bathroom tap has never made me sick.

Hi all

 

Our first cruise, and I read somewhere that the water on the ship is re filtered and reused, the dirty black water is filtered to be drinkable.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The ship's black water is absolutely not filtered to be drinkable. Where did you read that?

http://thewanderlife.com/10-cruising-myths-exposed-its-not-always-like-on-the-love-boat-by-a-former-cruise-staff/

http://boards.cruisecritic.com/showthread.php?t=878157

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http://thewanderlife.com/10-cruising-myths-exposed-its-not-always-like-on-the-love-boat-by-a-former-cruise-staff/

 

http://boards.cruisecritic.com/showthread.php?t=878157

After skim reading those articles never stated that black or grey water after treatment is used for drinking.

Desalinated water may taste "funny" because some of the minerals found in tap or bottled water are removed and added back, perhaps not in the formula you may be used to...just looking at the bottle of water on my desk, ingredients: "purified water, calcium chloride, and sodium bicarbonate, potassium chloride and magnesium oxide".

Tap water on ships is perfectly safe to drink! :D

LuLu

Ocean-water desalination creates a safe and reliable water supply that is local and not dependent on varying weather conditions or water rights. Ocean-water desalination is the process of removing salt, other minerals and impurities from ocean water so that it can be used to supplement the existing water supply.

All cruise ships use either reverse osmosis or evaporation units using engine heat to produce drinking water.

The crew could not afford to drink bottled water.

There is nothing wrong with the water on the ship. I've been on 35 cruises and had tap water on all of them and I have never gotten sick. Please stop worrying and have a nice trip.

:D I've been cruising for 53 years and have had the tap water on many different ships and am still alive to tell about it.

Seriously, never had a problem!

LuLu

Hi all

 

Our first cruise, and I read somewhere that the water on the ship is re filtered and reused, the dirty black water is filtered to be drinkable. To counter this figured I would take a couple of bobble filter bottles, is this going to be sufficient or do I need to budget in bottle water costs too.

 

I don't want to get sick and drink a lot of water.

 

Any help on this would be appreciated.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sent from my iPad using Forums

"Ocean-water desalination creates a safe and reliable water supply that is local and not dependent on varying weather conditions or water rights. Ocean-water desalination is the process of removing salt, other minerals and impurities from ocean water so that it can be used to supplement the existing water supply.

Desalination is a time-tested process that originated in the Middle East, dating back to Julius Caesar around 49 BCE. There are more than 21,000 desalination plants in the world today. Saudi Arabia produces more than 70% of its drinking water from desalinated ocean-water and Australia is using desalinated ocean-water to supplement the water supply for some of its cities.

The United States’ first known experience with desalination was in 1791 when Thomas Jefferson had a simple distillation process printed on the backs of all papers distributed on ships, giving sailors an option to produce drinking water in case of emergency.

The first desalination plant built in the U.S. occurred in the 1960’s at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. When water supplies to the naval base were cut off in retaliation for the Cuban Missile Crisis, the base became self-sufficient, desalinating 3.4 million gallons of water every day.

Today, cruise ships and submarines desalinate ocean-water to meet the needs of their passengers, but less than 1% of the U.S. population on land currently receives desalinated water to drink. Ocean-water desalination has been in practice in the U.S. for hundreds of years, though, and as the technology continues to improve, it is becoming easier and more affordable to produce desalinated ocean-water for everyday human uses."

DON

I wonder how often the water in many cities is ''recycled'' ? No different to the water on a ship ?

The water is perfectly clean and fine....it's not "recycled"....grey water is used for toilets and such...but every faucet has new, clean water!

I wonder how often the water in many cities is ''recycled'' ? No different to the water on a ship ?

Most US tap water comes from either rain-fed reservoirs or deep wells where nature's percolation does a highly effective purification job. Not so in much more densely populated areas - such as London - where elevated estrogen levels in re-cycled tap water has been suggested as being responsible for increased male mammaries and reduced procreative potency.

Please do not yell at me - rather explore "estrogen in London drinking water" on the Internet.

Lesson for the day.....don't believe everything you read on the internet.

Now if you will excuse me, I have a date with a French model. :D

I'd be more worried about the bottled water than the ship's water.

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I'd be more worried about the bottled water than the ship's water.

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The thing that gets me from an ecology standpoint is all those plastic bottles in a landfill.

Hi all

 

Our first cruise, and I read somewhere that the water on the ship is re filtered and reused, the dirty black water is filtered to be drinkable. To counter this figured I would take a couple of bobble filter bottles, is this going to be sufficient or do I need to budget in bottle water costs too.

 

I don't want to get sick and drink a lot of water.

 

Any help on this would be appreciated.

 

Sent from my iPad using Forums

As others have said, not true! And the filters are not necessary. The water is perfectly clean and very safe to drink.

I just got off My first cruise on Sunday and I thought the water was good! Don't let that stuff scare you!

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water on cruise ships is "made" in one of two ways. reverse osmosis

http://espwaterproducts.com/about-reverse-osmosis.htm

or by evaporation.(heated and pure water captured.). There are rules about when and when a ship can make water. It can't be done in the harbor.

Ships also buy pure water from certified sources. see http://www.cdc.gov/nceh/vsp/desc/about_inspections.htm

Grey water and black water are treated and released under specific circumstances. effluent is removed. They cannot be used in the potable water system but can be used in the toilets(not the sinks-the commodes)...so don't drink the toilet water.

see also http://www.cruising.org/regulatory/issues-facts/public-health-medical-capabilities/sanitation

They in both the evaporation and reverse osmosis systems add minerals back into the water to improve the taste.

I wonder how often the water in many cities is ''recycled'' ? No different to the water on a ship ?

Let me tell you a story about city recycled water. I live in Las Vegas which like many cities in the Southwest is dependent upon Colorado River water. The allotment of water between the states is determined by an agreement which was first done in the 1920's although it has been modified at least once since.

When the agreement was first worked out, the population of Las Vegas was about 10 (actually more like a couple of thousand) so we were not allotted much water. As I said, the agreement was recently redone but we still are not allotted enough water. All of the other cities that use Colorado River water have the same problem - not enough.

Compared to many of the other rivers in the United States, the Colorado is a small river. The most recent data for the Colorado River flow through the Grand Canyon is about 10,000 cubic feet per second. The flow rate for the Columbia River is about 264,000 cubic feet per second - 26 times the flow rate of the Colorado. The Mississippi River flows at at 593,000 cubic feet per second - 59 times the flow rate of the Colorado.

So all of us do recycling to get recycling credits. This means that if we, for example, are allotted 1,000,000 gallons of water and we return 800,000 gallons back into the river, we get recycle credits of 800,000 gallons and we to use 1,800,000 gallons instead of our allotted 1,000,000 gallons.

Guess where this recycled water comes from. It comes from lawn runoff. It comes from the water that goes down your sink. It comes from water that goes down your shower. It even comes from water that goes down your toilet.

I managed the wastewater treatment plant lab in Clark County, Las Vegas and one of the responsibilities of our lab was to ensure that the quality of the water we put back into the river met required EPA standards which it always did, even though some of it came from the maybe 1,000,000 toilets in Las Vegas. The water was totally drinkable.

The bottom line is that by the time the water got to Los Angeles, some of it had passed through toilets in every upstream city. Even though I knew that the water we discharged was totally safe, I always enjoyed the fact that the eco-freaks in California were drinking at least a little my toilet water.

I can assure you that water on a ship is not recycled. There is no reason to do it as there is lots of water in the ocean outside of the ship and enough available energy on the ship to desalinate or distill it to convert it to better potable water than you get out of your faucet at home. What the ships do with gray water or black water is to clean it up so it meets environmental standards and then dump the water back into the ocean at a sufficient distance off shore. The dilution factor takes care of any problems considering that the Atlantic Ocean contains about 17,543,940,979,332,434 gallons of water.

You may not like the taste of the water on the ship - that is a different issue as waters in different cities taste different because of low levels of inorganic impurities. New York City water is one of the best tasting big city waters in the country. Las Vegas water does not taste as good because of the higher but legal levels of TDS in the water.

Bottom line - the water you get on the ship is better than the water that comes out of your faucet at home unless you have an expensive RO and filtering system for your home water.

BTW - three guesses where the bottled water you buy comes from unless you buy the more expensive spring water. It comes directly from your city water and is purified by RO and ion exchange and then minerals are added to improve the taste. As this reference - http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2009/07/09/09greenwire-fewer-regulations-for-bottled-water-than-tap-g-33331.html - indicates, the bottled water industry works under lower level of federal regulation than does your city water system. We got regularly inspected to ensure that our water met regulations and that we were following the approved federal analytical protocols. We got test samples that we had to analyze on a quarterly basis to prove that we were capable of performing good analyses. Although I as lab manager knew which samples were our federal audit samples, they were given to my staff as blind samples so they were treated and analyzed in exactly the same manner as the rest of the samples we ran. We were required by federal law to report any test results that were outside limits to our local EPA office. Our lab was certified. We reported the results of our tests to our business and home customers regularly. You may prefer the taste of bottled water but you have no guarantee that it was as clean and contaminant free as the water we supplied you at a much lower cost.

I will now get off my soap box.

DON

Most US tap water comes from either rain-fed reservoirs or deep wells where nature's percolation does a highly effective purification job. Not so in much more densely populated areas - such as London - where elevated estrogen levels in re-cycled tap water has been suggested as being responsible for increased male mammaries and reduced procreative potency.

 

Please do not yell at me - rather explore "estrogen in London drinking water" on the Internet.

For the record...

The vast majority of estrogen content in drinking water supplies comes from animal manure, not birth control pills:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/12/101208125813.htm

A recent report on water quality in the UK cited Bisphenol A (in plastics) as an endocrine disruptor, because it mimics estradiol. Didn't mention estrogen from human females as a problem. Also found several drugs including caffeine, ibuprofen, and a metabolite of cocaine. But all of these are found in amounts well below WHO's daily intake guidelines. Even chlorination is not without risks.

http://www.publichealthcommunication.org.uk/edc-ppcp/RiskAssessmentRobjohns2013.pdf

Thank you for all the information its helped reassure me, given the number of trips you have all done and lived, it's all good.

I won't be taking extra water on board now.

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Thanks donaldsc. Great to get info from someone who has worked in the field.

:D I've been cruising for 53 years and have had the tap water on many different ships and am still alive to tell about it.

Seriously, never had a problem!

LuLu

ME TOO!! Saving money by not buying bottled water helps pay for another cruise.