Different towns - different water.

It's surprising how much the water quality changes from one place to another. Our current house sit does not have a built in water filter for drinking, but it does have a couple of filter jugs that sit on the bench and do a satisfactory job.

It is a very  basic design, but it does the job and filters the water. It's easy to refill and holds about a litre of filtered water in the base.

Today I decided to replace the filters. They are cartridges that you have to buy and insert into the jugs. I took the old cartridge down to the supermarket, because in previous houses I have bought the wrong cartridge, and once all the packaging has been opened you can't really take them back, and they are expensive to buy, these ones were $13.00 each.

After we had unpacked the groceries Peter put in the first cartridge. From memory you have to sort of wash them through, I think rinse them a couple of times. On the outer box it says, 'Instructions for use, please see cartridge foil'. Okay, we open the box and take out the cartridge completely enclosed in a blue and white foil covering.

'There's no instruction on here', Peter says to me. The printing is so tiny, probably a 2 font! and the whole foil  cover is covered with this tiny white writing. But there is nothing in English! There are instructions in 9 languages that seem to range from some sort of Russian Language to Korean, possibly Greek, French, maybe Malaysian, but no English. Not one little bit of English to tell  us how to deal with this cartridge. There are 25 listings in 25 languages telling us who the distributors are in different countries. Way down the bottom there is a bit that tells us it was made in Oxfordshire in England. The outer carton says proudly that it was made in the UK, and the Australian distributor was savvy enough to make the outer package of recycled material. That's good, that helps the tree situation. But no English instructions on what to do with it.

So Peter has gone off to have his afternoon nap while the cartridges are sitting waiting. While I have been closely examining the foil wrapping, guess what I have found. Hidden way down the bottom, are a series of six little diagrams! Ah here are the instructions! Picture one shows the cartridge going into the jug, or maybe its showing the cartridge coming out, its hard to tell. The second pic shows a jug with the lid up and something happening with tap water, I'm not sure. Maybe its rinsing out the inner part that holds the un-filtered water. The third pic shows a hand putting the cartridge sideways under water and moving it back and forwards. The fourth picture looks the same as number 1, although maybe there is water in this one. The fifth picture shows a tap filling the jug and emptying it again and has a 2X there. The last one, has the same jug with a little bit of water in the bottom, a 3X=ok and a big tick.

I think it is saying to submerge the cartridge and rinse three times before using it.

Someone in England needs a very basic lesson on how to write instructions.

As for the water quality in different places. Here on the Gold Coast it is not too bad, but where we are has some of the chlorine smell to it, and I don't like that, so am happy to filter it each day. On the Sunshine Coast the water was quite good to drink. In Brisbane it was okay. But one of our house sits in New South Wales was a different matter.

The house itself was fine, having an enormous concrete tank, and the water was pumped to the kitchen and came through a good filtering system at the tap. But we went into town one evening to a Chinese restaurant, and asked for water. It was revolting. We sent the first lot back and said it was undrinkable, could we have another. The second one was just as bad. When we commented on it to the waitress she just shrugged her shoulders and said it was the town water, and more or less indicated, 'take it or leave it'. We left it. She didn't care. She didn't even offer us a bottle of water, or coke or something which we would have bought.

Anyway, when Peter arises from his afternoon nanna-nap I will show him the little pictures. We are going to put the jugs through the dishwasher to give them a good clean, then he can rinse 3X and put them in.