Asklemmy

I'm in Canada and we drink from the tap.

Spainiard here. You can drink tap water everywhere (that's connected to the drinking water network, obviously), but there are better tasting waters than others. Madrid's water is bad, Barcelona's is atrocious (I don't know anyone living there that doesn't buy bottled water, it even gives weird flavours when cooking), but other places are nicer. My town's water is awesome, I just fill up bottles from the tap and put them in the fridge for easy cold water and laugh at the camacus.

I live in Sweden. Yeah, the tap water is clean and can be drank straight from the tap without boiling, filtering, or treatment in the whole country.

Illinois, US. tap water has always been safe to drink wherever I've lived in this state. I've only been under a boil order a couple times in my life. That being said, I do filter my tap water otherwise it tastes strange to me

Yep, in the Netherlands we drink tap water all the time. No reason to boil it, except for tea of coffee of course.

I'm from 🇵🇭, particularly Davao City (southern part of the country).

Tap water is drinkable here although there are water bottles available.

Most first world countries will issue boil warnings when there may be a necessary reason. Ie) water main work or other contamination.

Iceland should be fine. In fact, I think they have some of the cleanest water around.

In NZ, the only time I've boiled water is when we had an earthquake that screwed up a bunch of stuff, including the water & sewage pipes.

No boiling, but I bought a filter after listening to a story about PFAS.

Hell to do the no. The heavy metals alone would either kill me from anemia or make me go insane. It's bottled water for us in Mexico, unfortunately. :/ Those saying you can safely drink water from the tap in certain countries.. are you sure? Have you measured it yourself? Even some of the bottled water I ran some tests on back in the day were iffy.

Some Spanish cities: In Madrid, people drink tap water without boiling. Some leave it to rest so the slight chlorine smell leaves the water. In Barcelona and Valencia, being coastal cities with desalinators, their water is too "heavy" (has too high a density of minerals), which makes it unhealthy to consume on a regular basis, and boiling it does nothing, so people buy a lot of bottled water.

Australia- Safe to drink. The water is chlorinated and fluoridated (for dental health).

I'm not 100% sure if the water is fluoridated across the whole country or just in my state

Austria here, I drink tap water without boiling all the time without thinking twice about it. Pretty much in the entire EU I feel safe doing so.

I've lived in Milan (Italy) London (UK) and Rethymno (Greece) tap water is safe to drink in all of them, extremely good in Milan just straight up, good in London but with a lot of limescale so we filtered it for taste reasons, and the same as London in Rethymno.

The further I searched, the more it seems to me that in developed countries (like US, Canada and the above examples), tap water is safe to drink directly. Is that true? Do you drink tap water without boiling?

Yes. It's a bit of a scandal when that's not true. (Canada here)

And to my surprise, I checked the Water Supplies Department website and notice it asserts that tap water in Hong Kong is potable, like many well-developed countries and regions.

Boiling it has to be "force of habit", then. I wonder how long it's been potable. I'm guessing mainland China is mostly boil-first.

Northern California, United States.

I filter my tap water mostly for taste, but it's completely safe to drink without boiling. I would even argue that it's beneficial to drink because of the fluoride (I'm not an anti-fluoride/anti-science nutjob).

In Canada, I know people from Hong Kong who still boil water before drinking. They have been in Canada for 40+ years, have seen everyone around them drink tap water, and yet hang on to this ritual of boiling copious amounts of water.

The thing about living in an undeveloped countries is that you don't have to worry about that sort of thing.. I'm pretty fucking sure a billion things will get me before contaminates water does.

Croatia here,

tap water is completely drinkable and safe without any boiling. Exception are some more remote islands, so if you are going on some island, chekc if the tap water is drinkable.

Fun fact: Croatia actually uses drinkable water for toilets as well, altough i would not drink from a toilet :)

Australian here, I grew up drinking tap water without boiling it but since I married my wife who is Chinese, I must drink it after it was boiled. It's good for the healthy.

I’m in Australia and have never boiled tap water before. Sometimes during major storms or flooding you get a boil water alert but these are usually advisory and monitoring shows that in most cases the water is still within legal limits. Of course though you should still boil the water if an alert does go out.

I am in Japan and have no issues with tap water here, used to drink it regularly.

I live closer to Mt. Fuji now and go get spring water from the mountain weekly instead. There's a basin at a shrine nearby that collects it and is free for people to take. No issues with the tap water, but this water tastes a lot better.

I live in Vietnam and tap water is always boiled before drinking. Our tap water sucks.

New Zealand, we drink it from the tap although some claim to dislike it depending on which part of the country your in, personally I think they're a bit too fussy

Canadian in a major city - yes, safe to drink right from the tap.

However, many remote communities here do not have access to safe drinking water.

You can drink the tap water in most places in Iceland without boiling it (especially in Reykjavik), but if you're further into the countryside then I would check first!

US. The tap water is safe to drink. Occasionally a metro area will have problems and issue a boil order, telling people to boil tap water before drinking, but this is rare. Some areas have problems with lead contamination due to aging infrastructure, but this too is uncommon in the modern day.

France : we drink tap water directly without any issue. People who drink bottled water is because they dislike the taste of tap water where they live.

Canadian here, drinking water right of the tap.

Finland has all around signs for foreigners that the tap water is not only drinkable, but very high quality. https://yle.fi/a/3-10303369

But for some unfathomable reason, maybe to push more expensive drinks, many restaurants charge for tap water. Except they do not tell it in advance, you just get surprised by it on the bill and swear never to go that place again.

Acc. to this site it's fine to drink cold water without boiling in Iceland. However don't drink the tap warm water - it's sulphurous.

But answering your question, in Brazil it varies from city to city. I drink tap water in my city just fine, without boiling or filtering; but I had to do both in another city ~400km from here.

I live in Ecuador. Tap water can be drunk without boiling on the capital and most other cities in the andes. In the Amazon and the pacific is better to boil it first. Guayaquil the second largest city has a reputation of having incredibly dangerous water

Spaniard here. I've been drinking unboiled tap water since I was a kid. It's perfectly safe to do that.

Finnish here and the tap water here is one of the cleanest in the world, so yeah, I drink straight from the tap.