I wasn't aware that so few drink their own tapwater. During the summer, my father-in-law liked our water so much, he would fill 2 litre pop bottles of the stuff and take it home and freeze it for future use. He always kept a thawing bottle in his fridge for drinking water. Our water is mineralized but fortunately, the iron and other stuff it is not over the top, flavour wise and is always icy cold with no smell of chlorine. Only real downside is that when our power goes off here so does our water but emergency preparation becomes second nature.

Because both our daughters had been raised on it, they found that the first thing they had to purchase, when they left home were Brita water filter jugs, because the smell of chlorine was so foreign to them.

Someone once commented that we were lucky to have all that free water coming out of the ground. What a hoot! This stuff doesn't come cheap when you factor in the personal cost of drilling a well, driving in casing, replacing pumps (we're on our 4th) and pressure tanks (2nd) over the years. If you roll that into the cost of a mortgage it becomes very pricey indeed.

What it does do is make one very conscious and protective of the precious the aquifer and because we only have a recovery rate of about 3 gal per minute on our well (one of the shallowerer of the drilled wells in this area) and there can be a very long period of drought from June until October, we have been in the habit of practising water conservation for the past thirty years. Fortunately, we have never run dry, although some of our neighbours have problems come September and have to have water trucked in. Might seem odd in what is considered by most as a temperate rainforest.

There has been noises in the last few years that the current provincial government is considereding imposing a tax on a well water. The supposed justification is to make us country folk aware of water conservation and only further confirmed my opinion that they are an ignorant lying bunch of bastards.