When you are travelling to a new area, one of the first things you need to know is whether the water is drinkable. Many an exotic holiday has been completely ruined by stomach cramps and bacterial infections from drinking unsafe tap water.
Tap water quality can also be a concern for long-term residents. Our senses are very good at getting used to things they are exposed to every day, so you may not even notice if there is something wrong with water you have been drinking for years.
Most of Australia is lucky enough to have access to clean, drinkable water, but it is still a good idea to educate yourself about what you might be putting in your body. Whether you are a tourist wondering, “can I drink tap water in Perth”, or a lifelong WA resident considering the question “is Perth tap water bad for you”, familiarising yourself with the facts can bring vital comfort and peace of mind.
This blog post will walk you through the key things you need to know about tap water quality in Perth, including how to make sure you are getting the best water possible straight from the tap.
Why does Perth water taste bad?
For most Perth residents, drinking water straight out of the tap is quite an unpleasant experience. This is largely due to the high levels of chlorine added to the water before it reaches your home. Chlorine is the most widely used water treatment chemical in the world, and Australia has been using it for decades to neutralise harmful bacteria and waterborne diseases.
The challenge of using chlorine in a state as large as Western Australia is that the chemical will dissipate over time as it travels to your home. Water utilities must use large amounts of chlorine (or add ammonia to make it bond into chloramine, a longer-lasting chemical) to make sure any bacteria that enter the water stream later in its journey can still be treated by the disinfectant.
However, this means that a larger amount of chlorine or chloramine will still be in your water when it reaches your home, and homes near treatment facilities will often struggle with overpowering chemical tastes and smells in their water.
Australia’s drinking water guidelines allow for chlorine concentrations up to 5mg/L. For context, the threshold for impacting the taste of your water is typically around 0.7mg/L, and the recommended dosage for a swimming pool is only 1-3mg/L.
So, can you drink Perth tap water? Broadly speaking, yes, but you will probably want to boil or filter it first. Treatment chemicals are a big part of making Perth tap water drinkable, but these kinds of allowable chlorine thresholds make “drinkable” a lower bar than you might expect.
Perth water quality and characteristics
Australia is a large and geographically diverse country. Australian tap water quality and characteristics can vary significantly within the country, whether you’re comparing cities on opposite ends of the continent or suburbs within the same city. There are many factors that can influence Perth tap water quality, but most homes in the greater Perth area will likely have certain traits in common.
Hardness
Water is considered “hard” when it has elevated levels of dissolved minerals like calcium, magnesium, and potassium (more than 60mg/L). These minerals are particularly common in water that is sourced from groundwater stores or rivers that flow through limestone banks. These dissolved minerals are non-toxic and very difficult to remove through filtration, so the Water Corporation focuses its resources on disinfecting Perth’s water rather than softening it.
Most drinking water Perth residents access will be above the hard water threshold. This typically manifests as limescale, a chalky white residue that forms around shower heads and glassware. Areas with hard water may also have issues with soap scum and reduced effectiveness for lathering products like shampoo, conditioner, and detergent.
Limescale can cause expensive damage if left untreated, so most homeowners in Perth would benefit from using a water softener to reduce hard water damage.
Chemicals
ChemicalsWhile regional areas use a variety of small-scale treatment methods like ultraviolet disinfection, Australia’s capital cities primarily use one of two chemicals to disinfect their water: chlorine and chloramine. Chloramine is a compound of chlorine and ammonia that does not dissipate or break down as easily, making it a better option for water that needs to travel longer distances from the treatment facilities. However, chloramine is also able to slip through most carbon water filters without being adsorbed like ordinary chlorine.
Fortunately, Perth uses chlorine as its primary disinfectant rather than chloramine. This means that you will be able to filter the treatment chemicals and disinfection by-products out of your water with a high-quality carbon filter without needing to add custom configurations for catalytic carbon.
However, Perth tap water is also treated with small amounts of fluoride. Water fluoridation has been a controversial topic since its introduction in the 1950s, with concerns about the health implications and ethics of adding this chemical to public water supplies frequently raised in public and official discourse.
Water fluoridation is intended to improve dental health, adding trace amounts of the chemical to our tap water so that our mouths produce slightly fluoridated saliva and reduce tooth decay. However, many are concerned about the safety of uncontrolled variables like exposure levels in homes with higher water consumption.
Fluoride removal cannot be achieved by most jug, tap, shower, or whole-home filters. Removing this dissolved substance typically requires incredibly thorough purification through a process like reverse osmosis or very slow filtration through dedicated gravity cartridges.
Turbidity
Turbidity is a measure of your tap water’s clarity, impacted by visible impurities like rust and sediments. Perfectly clear water has low turbidity, while water with a brown or grey tint is likely more turbid.
Under normal circumstances, Perth tap water has relatively low turbidity compared to regional areas. However, a whole-home filter connected to your mains pipe will show how much rust and silt passes through your pipes over just a few months.
Turbidity can also be heavily impacted by works and maintenance to water pipes in your area. Elevated silt levels from pipe repairs can lead to mineral stains, discolouration, and even a reduction in water pressure for your home.
Does Perth have good tap water compared to other cities?
Every capital city in Australia has tap water that meets national standards for safe drinking water. However, some cities have noticeably better or worse water than others. Perth, unfortunately, is on the lower end of this scale.
Because of its size and relative dryness, Perth has to make more compromises on its tap water quality. More than two-thirds of Perth’s water supply regions have hard water, and the combination of disinfected groundwater and processed seawater is generally considered inferior to Melbourne or Sydney’s rainwater reservoirs.
Is Perth water safe to drink? Generally, yes. Is it the best water in the country? Not by any measure. When it comes to water quality Perth will not be winning any national awards for taste, smell, or softness.
Where to get Perth drinking water analysis data
Perth municipal water is managed by the Water Corporation, Western Australia’s state water utility. In addition to supplying and treating water for Australian homes, the Water Corporation is responsible for monitoring and maintaining water quality across the state.
The Water Corporation website provides a number of reports and tables showing measurements from Perth’s various water testing regions (as well as a map showing where these regions are). The data is divided into health information, which focuses on whether potentially harmful chemicals and bacteria were kept within their allowable limits, and aesthetic information, which shows levels of impurities that impact taste, smell, hardness, and clarity.
However, these reports only give broad information for large areas around the Perth region. You can see your suburb’s highest, lowest, and average readings for water hardness over the course of 12 months, but this information tells you very little about your own home. For relevant, actionable data, the best option is to speak with an expert directly.
Complete Home Filtration offers free in-home water consultations that help you understand exactly what’s coming out of your taps. There is a lot more to your water than which suburb you live in, so speaking with a technician about your individual circumstances and getting a personal water test can provide much more detailed and accurate information.
How to improve Perth drinking water
Can you drink tap water in Perth without doing anything to improve the taste or smell? Fortunately, this will rarely be your only option – especially with the growing popularity of whole home water filtration systems.
Complete Home Filtration, Australia’s most-awarded provider of whole house water filters, was founded and installed its first filtration systems in Perth. Designed from the ground up for Australian water, these systems have custom configurations to deal with a wide range of Perth tap water quality concerns.
Each whole-home system has a dedicated sediment filter for turbidity, an ion-exchange resin for hardness, and a high-grade activated carbon filter that removes up to 98.5% of chlorine and its disinfection by-products. Water filters from Complete Home Filtration give you the benefits of a high quality water filter on every tap and outlet in your home, all from a single unit installed onto the mains.
For the best possible Perth tap water quality, we also offer under-sink reverse osmosis water purifiers. While the whole home water filters remove particles as small as a single micron, these reverse osmosis systems strip away anything larger than 0.0005 microns.
Whether you are interested in protecting your home and family from chemicals and hard water damage or just want to learn more about tap water in your area, contact Complete Home Filtration’s experts by filling out our contact form or calling 1300 693 458.
