Thailand… What’s Really in the Water

Añadido: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]The people that live in the villages in this  surrounding area have been drinking water from this well for over 100 years. Today I have come  to the well to take some samples and find out is the water actually safe and healthy or is  it indeed dirty and dangerous. Now the reason that I know villagers have been drinking this  water for over a hundred years here is because Damo's mother and grandmother used to collect this  water to drink. It wasn't always this way with the concrete surround. Before it was just a well. As  you can see from the water, it is rather clear.

[00:00:34]You can see through to a certain extent. It looks  clear. It has a slight blue tinge as well. There are still a good number of villages that use this  for the drinking water, though many also use it to just wash dishes or do other things. Now, this  journey and interest into drinking water began for me when I started filtering our own water at home.  I did this because I didn't want to have many microplastics coming into the water. Sometimes  in Thailand when you buy water from the factory, it's in a blue tank or obviously you can buy it  from the supermarket. It's often left in the sun for a long time which can cause microplastics to  go into the water. And also the blue tanks are blasted with sand to clean them which is quite  abrasive and pulls off small microplastics into the water. In order to have better control of  this, I installed a water filtration system which consists of three large sediment tanks that  contain one is a resin. The other one is manganese and iron and the other one is activated carbon.  After it goes through the free large tanks, it will then go through a seven stage filter which  begins with three smaller sediment tanks. From there, it goes into the reverse osmosis filter.  Then it will go into a GAC filter. Then finally, it will go through a UV light in order to kill any  microorganisms and through a remmineralization and a pH balancer to get the final water. My water  test at around 6.8 pH at the moment and it is uh very clean. I've had it lab tested. I've  talked about that on a previous vlog. Now, as you can see, the water itself does have some  debris floating in it. It also seems to have some brown foam. This could be from a frog spit or  something like that. Uh, but it's obviously got sediment in it. So, drinking it as is, you're  definitely ingesting some form of sediment.

[00:02:20]What I am told is that the villagers will scoop  this top layer of sediment off and collect the water inside. Sometimes it can be ran through a  cheesecloth in order to filter it further. Uh, but certainly in the old days there was no further  processing of the water. One of the limitations of what we're going to do today is I'm using home  testing kits. I've got the best ones I could get access to. We're going to be testing for bacteria  such as E.coli and caulifform. We'll also be testing the pH. We'll run a test strip as you can  see here that will look for things like metals, iron, uh we'll test alkalinity, hardness, and  whatnot. And of course, we'll do a TDS test. Now, I will say from the start as well, I'm hoping  that this water is clean for the sake of friends and family in the village. I'm going to move  the pond scum uh off the top and take the sample from inside the water. And so in terms of  tubidity, you can see it's still quite clear. Now, I will also note that there is frogs in there, or  at least one frog that I just saw living in there.

[00:03:26]So, he said that they collect this water to  drink and to shower and to cook food as well.

[00:03:34]He also says that the well is around 5 m deep.  And you can see as they're taking the water out, it's reducing all around the sides. So, this  is taking a serious amount of water. Now, I can also show you as well that my phone is  getting the temperature warning. That is how hot it is around here. And it feels hot to the touch.  So, now we're going to test the pH of the water.

[00:04:01]PH of water is quite important. It's important  you test at room temperature as well. You get the water to room temperature because uh that can  affect pH, the temperature of the water. Now, if it's too acidic, the problem is it can  cause corrosion on pipes and leech metals into the water. Or if it's too alkaline, it can  cause scaling and have a bitter taste. The pH of my water actually registers at a 6.8, my filtered  water. That's because we do a remmineralization.

[00:04:27]We put the minerals back into the water after  we've stripped everything away through the reverse osmosis. We do this because that makes the water  healthier to drink. It's got mineral content and it gives it a nicer taste. Today's water from the  well has obviously had no treatment at all. So, the chart here, red is uh 4.5, which means that  this water from the well is actually acidic. It's this means it would if left in metal containers,  metal pipes, things like that, it can cause uh corrosion. Often it's kept in very large ceramic  pots here. Uh not so much metal, but if it does run through pipes, it can be corrosive clearly. So  I'm quite surprised with that actually. I thought we were going to get a high alkali reading. So  now another important one is TDS. That's total dissolved solids. Usually for drinking water,  we're looking at uh under 500 mg per liter of total dissolved solids. Total dissolved solids can  include organic and inorganic compounds that exist in the water. We actually don't know if they're  the contaminants or the minerals. So it could be that a high mineral content water has a high TDS.  Uh but in in this case, we we cannot separate the two. We're not going to know if it's high um or  low because of mineral content or contaminants.

[00:05:55]Let's try this TDS. Wow. So, I'm actually quite  shocked because the TDS of the wellwater has come in at 33. To be honest, I was expecting a reading  of above 500. To get 33 is a very good reading uh in the range of safe drinking water. Now,  I don't want to get too excited because low TDS alone doesn't mean that the water is safe.  There could be microorganisms in the water which are not tested for with uh TDS. Now, I'm going  to give you the final results of the test. The pH came in low as we already tested with the  reagent test. Total alkalinity also came in at zero. Carbonate came at zero. Hardness came  in at around 25. Sinuric acid came in at zero.

[00:06:46]Copper came in at zero. Mercury came in at zero.  Total chlorine came in at zero. Fle free chlorine zero. Bromine zero. Nitrate zero. Nitrite zero.  Iron 0.2. Chromium zero. Lead zero and fluoride zero. Now I'm quite confident with the TDS and  the pH tools. Uh these are very good tools that give very accurate readings. Although these  16-in1 reagent strips uh are notoriously not um specific enough. Sometimes there can be trace  amounts of iron or lead that this doesn't pick up uh just because it's in such small trace amounts.  However, there is one other test that we need to do and that is for bacteria including E.coli and  cifform where we're going to use a different test that takes 24 hours in order to get the result.  All right, so I thought I'd bring my wife in on the action here. You know a lot more about this  well water than I do. So your grandmother used to drink it and for generations. Yeah. Uh that one  is important uh place for the village people.

[00:07:55]We drink it for a long time ago you know before  they have the water for sale like that of water factory. Everybody go get the water over there for  drink and use. They still do. They were picking up when I went. Oh really? Yeah. Right. Well I'll  let you know the results. Mhm. So, uh this is only standard testing. I may actually send it off to  the lab as well when we go to Boram next. But the metal the the metals tests all came back clear.  So, no metals. Yeah. Um the there is no nitrates and nitrites. So, things like from fertilizers in  there as well. There the the TDS came back at 33.

[00:08:38]That very what you call pure mineral water. Very  low. Yeah. It's very clean. It like a safe. The level is cuz I was expecting 600 800. Yeah. So  33. The only issue with it is it's acid. It's very acidic and smell because smell like muddy  like that. Yeah. You know like uh some people they stop drinking because the smell like more  muddy. Muddy. uh because since they buy the water from factory there is no smell right and then in  in this pond that I think that is natural smell natural smells natural natural water. So the only  thing we're going to do finally is the bacteria test but that'll take 24 hours. I'm going to  show you in this vlog how that'll that's going to come back and that will tell us if there's any  uh caulifform or ecoli in the water any bacteria.

[00:09:33]So you surprised with TDS? Yeah, surprised. I I  think like that's why the water clear all the time because we drink that for a long time and nobody  gets sick from from that water. Yeah, that's another good point. Nobody does get sick from the  water. So that's and you see like around around the area they really protect, you know, have the  wall from animals. Yeah. From animal. And have the gate. There's a frog living in it, though. Nature.  Nature. Nature. I seen a frog in there. So, now 48 hours later, we have the results of the bacteria  test. And to be honest, I've been quite surprised.

[00:10:13]As you can see, uh, from the bottle here, if the  test is yellow or clear, then there's no bacteria, no colorform bacteria detected. If it is green,  it is highly likely that caulifform bacteria are present. And as you can see, this is the result.  This doesn't tell us which colorform bacteria is present, but it does tell us that the water is  dangerous. In fact, it says on the back here, if you have a positive result, add bleach to the  sample and then pour it down the toilet thoroughly wash your hands. Consider the water unsafe and  contact your local health department for bacterial confirmation, count and type, and suggest actions  to be taken, which sounds pretty serious. Now, it could be the case because I took the water  sample from the top of the water that there's more likely to be bacteria there. And so, I'm a little  bit disappointed to be honest cuz I was kind of hoping that the water was going to come back like  miraculously pure and drinkable and whatnot. So, as I said, locally in the village, many people  are using this water to shower. I'm not sure to the extent of who is drinking it. Definitely,  they used to drink it for many years. So, I don't know if you can build up resistance to  caulifform uh bacteria over the years or it just your system kind of gets used to it. I'm going  to do a bacteria test of the groundwater. So, this comes from very deep within the ground.  This is our groundwater here and then I'm going to compare that to our final filtered water for  cifform bacteria and we will see the results that I get. So, I felt like this vlog would probably  be incomplete without running some further tests after we saw the result of the tests of the  wellwater. And so, what I decided to do is run two more bacteria tests to just make sure that we were  not being exposed to any bacteria. And I was also interested in the groundwater. So, first of all,  I can tell you I had run this before as well about 6 months ago, but this is the bacteria test for  the filtered water. So our filtered water which obviously goes through an extensive filtration  process and is finalized with a UV light which is all about removing microorganisms and bacteria  and whatnot. So uh as we expected there is no colorform bacteria in our filtered water. But I  did go ahead and also test the unfiltered water.

[00:12:34]So this is the water from very very deep in the  ground. And this is going to let us know is the contamination from the caulifform bacteria  happening from groundwater or the deep ground water or is it happening up near the surface  and the result of the unfiltered groundwater.

[00:12:52]Uh this is unfiltered here, F on that one, U on  this one. Um this is no colorform bacteria in the unfiltered. And so these two tests together  coming back with no colorform bacteria suggest that any contamination that is happening with the  water is happening at surface level or just below surface level. This could be a number of causes.  It could be my sample was a bad sample. Could be uh animal uh activity around the area that ends up  getting into the water. Um but as we conclude from this vlog uh it really should be uh second staged  filtered if it's coming from the well water.

[00:13:32]And so that is the end of this journey really  looking into the water here in rural Thailand.