Old homes and businesses here in Atlanta may have more trouble with lead in drinking water than newer construction. However, lead should always be a consideration, even if you just test your water once in a while to ensure its safety for your employees, your customers, or even your family. In this blog, we’re going to take a look at how to detect lead in drinking water and how to remove lead from drinking water. Let’s jump right in.
Why Is Lead in Drinking Water Dangerous?
We often hear about lead in paint when we get those pamphlets from landlords or real estate companies, but we don’t always think about lead in drinking water. Lead can be extremely harmful to humans, especially children, babies, and unborn babies. These are some of the long-term effects of lead exposure in humans:
- Behavioral changes
- Impaired brain development
- Attention disorders
- Lowered IQ
- A delay in physical development
As you can see, lead can cause very serious issues over periods of time. The EPA sets “acceptable” levels of lead in drinking water at 15 ppm for all samples tested. However, any business or household may want to take action below this threshold. The question that remains is “is any amount of lead safe?” That’s for you, your business, and your families to decide.
How Does Lead in Drinking Water Happen?
It’s common knowledge that lead is dangerous, and we use copper and PVC piping in homes and businesses nowadays to mitigate that. However, here in Atlanta, some of our under-street and street-to-home (or street-to-business) piping is still heavy, leaden pipes. This means that, if the water sits there long enough, lead can build up and become an issue.
Since most homes and businesses use water fast enough, it’s not usually a problem and doesn’t warrant the city or state spending money to rip up that infrastructure.
How to Remove Lead in Drinking Water:
Test Your Water
Here at Hydroserve, we offer water testing services so that you can identify what’s in your drinking water. While these testing services are normally used for boilers and cooling systems, there’s no reason you can’t send us a sample from the line that gets used in your corporate coffee machine, soda machine, or break room sink. We can tell you if there are dangerous levels of lead in your water so that you can take action fast.
Install a Water Treatment System
The most common system used for removing lead from drinking water is the reverse osmosis system. This system uses a semipermeable membrane to allow only clean, filtered water to pass through and allow into your critical drinking water apparatuses. Reverse osmosis systems are incredibly cost-effective and can improve your overall water taste. We offer all kinds of water filtration systems at Hydroserve.
Hydroserve: Your Source for Water Treatment in Atlanta
Regardless of your water treatment needs, Hydroserve is here to help you. We serve Metro Atlanta and surrounding areas by offering services like boiler water treatment, cooling tower refurbishment, cooling tower water treatment, and various other water treatment and testing services. Get in touch with us today to see how we can help your business.