I hate my new Brita.
Okay, hate is a strong word. But I certainly don’t love the thing.
Like most people (well, sensible people) we eschew bottled water in favour of tap. But even though Toronto’s tap water is fine and safe, it often tastes a bit chemically. Thus, most people I know use a filtration system of some kind. For year’s we’ve had one of the ones that fits right onto the tap. Flip the little lever and voila! filtered water. Flip it back for regular water for washing dishes, etc.
The problem is that we live in a kind of shitty apartment complex where management tends to cheap out on things like fixtures. On one level I understand that; tenants have a habit of treating rental units badly, there’s no point in installing Moen taps in every unit when half of them will get trashed within a year. We’d buy and install our own better quality fixtures but I’m not putting money into someone else’s building, so unless I could take them with me when I eventually go, that isn’t happening.
Which is a long-winded way of saying that the on-tap filter was never especially practical, since the tap was kind of crappy and didn’t reach very far – rinsing out the sink was a pain, and we really needed on of those attachments that twisted and swivelled.
Recently I’ve had plumbers (like cockroaches only with saggy pants and bad cologne), and discovered after they had left one day that one of them had been fiddling with my water filter attachment, and had broken it. When we turned the tap on, water sprayed every which way.
Instead of replacing it we opted for the non-filtering swively tap thingie and a Brita.
Oh, but I don’t like the Brita.
To be fair, the water tastes better. The Brita filters out more gunk than the other thing did. But it… takes… so… long… to… fill. Gah!
And the capacity is less than the jug o’ water we used before, so every time we have a glass of water (which is 6 to 8 times a day for me), the Brita needs refilling. Also, the charcoal bits are getting loose in the upper reservoir. This doesn’t filter thorough into the jug itself, but the floaty bits weird me out – they look like dirt, which shouldn’t be in my water. And the thing doesn’t fit especially well onto the fridge shelf, but if I move the shelves, everything else won’t fit right.
Also, the swively tap thing makes a godawful noise – like someone jamming a cat into a paper shredder. So we also have to remember to fill the Brita before the other person’s gone to bed because the noise wakes us up (or rather Greg needs to remember to not fill it after I’ve gone to bed). It gets the corners of the sink clean now, but oh, the noise.
I know… I’m whining and complaining unnecessarily. At least I have fresh clean water to drink, right? Plenty of people around the world don’t. And sometimes helping the environment is a bit inconvenient.
But I’m never gonna love the thing.
