Getting to the root of water quality

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Ever wonder about the quality of your tap water? Nashila Addetia traveled for two weeks and gathered two dozen samples to test with various results. Here is a cheap and easy way to test your water.

By the end of the two-week trip, the car was packed with tap-water samples from more than two dozen cities, stored in airtight, leak-proof containers. As a growing amount of trunk space was sacrificed to the collection, Nashila’s father began to wonder what was going to become of all this water. What he might not have guessed was that Nashila planned to throw a buttercrunch lettuce seed into each of the samples, then watch what happened.

“It was actually a fun experiment,” she says. “Lettuce seeds are a good indicator of the quality of water. If there are any pollutants in the water, the roots will be smaller.”

This might also work on that microwaved water test that is going on in here.
Tested my tap water, the city just spent millions on that new membrane system developed here in Canada. The roots got pretty long over two and half inches.

The best thing to do with water is to do an Atomic Absorption analysis on it. I can't remember the rules for putting water in the GCMS, but I think you can. That would definitely tell you any other substances in the water.

Anyway, microwaved water has been analyzed before. It is not chemically different from unmicrowaved water. It is not radioactive afterwards because no nuclear reactions have been involved. It is not ionized (well, water exists in a hydronium/hydroxide counterion balance, but that is something else) - I mean, the surface of the sun isn't even hot enough to ionize hydrogen. Don't worry about your microwave - it excites water molecules, it does not alter them.