What's Actually in Your Tap Water

The city does a remarkable job

New York City draws most of its water from the Catskill and Delaware watersheds — one of the largest unfiltered surface supplies in the United States, protected well enough that the EPA allows it to skip filtration at the source. It's disinfected, corrosion-controlled, and tested constantly. By the standards that govern public water systems, it's excellent.

Those standards, though, are designed to keep a population of millions safe and healthy at enormous scale. They are a floor, not a finish line — and they end at the property line. What happens in the last hundred feet, and what “safe for everyone” means versus “ideal for you,” is where the conversation actually begins.

The last hundred feet

Water can leave the reservoir clean and still arrive at your tap carrying things it picked up on the way. The most consequential is lead — almost never from the city's supply, and almost always from the service line, solder, and fixtures inside older buildings. The city adds orthophosphate specifically to reduce how much lead leaches from that plumbing, which helps. But the CDC and WHO are unambiguous: there is no blood-lead level in children considered safe.

This is why a building's age and plumbing history matter more than its ZIP code, and why a water report for “your neighborhood” tells you less than a test of your own tap.

What testing actually looks for

Beyond lead, a serious water analysis profiles a handful of categories that municipal averages tend to mask:

• PFAS. The so-called “forever chemicals.” A 2023 USGS study detected at least one PFAS compound in roughly 45% of U.S. tap water. The EPA has since set the first national limits for several of them.
• Microplastics. A 2018 peer-reviewed study found anthropogenic particles in 81% of tap-water samples worldwide, with U.S. samples showing the highest concentrations measured. The long-term health questions are still open — which is precisely the argument for not waiting on them.
• Disinfection byproducts and chlorine. The same chlorination that keeps water safe across hundreds of miles of pipe is also what you smell in a hot shower and taste in a glass — and it's hard on skin, hair, and fine fixtures.
• Hardness and minerals. Not everything in water is a contaminant. Calcium and magnesium are part of what makes water taste like water — which is why stripping a supply down to nothing is the wrong goal.

Filtration isn't one thing

The countertop pitcher and the under-sink cartridge solve a sliver of the problem, at one tap, for the water you drink. They do nothing for the shower you breathe in, the bath your children sit in, or the appliances you've invested in. Whole-home treatment addresses the water at the main line, then optimizes individual points of use — the kitchen tap, the espresso line, the showers — each for what it's actually for.

The aim is not maximum removal. A reverse-osmosis system that strips water to nothing also strips the minerals that make it pleasant and healthful to drink. The aim is the right removal: take out what shouldn't be there, keep what should.

How we approach it

We don't specify a system from a brochure. We test your water first — at the main line and at the points of use that matter to you — and build a contaminant profile against EPA drinking-water standards and NSF/ANSI benchmarks. Only then do we match equipment to what's actually present, alongside the practical realities of pressure, flow, serviceability, and the mineral profile you want to preserve. After installation, we verify performance through testing, and the system is monitored from there.

It's a quieter, more engineered way to arrive at the same place every homeowner wants: water you never have to think about.