J and I are water-drinkers. For years, that has meant we are bottled-water drinkers, since I'm a little picky and prefer my water be of the well-chilled variety rather than straight out of the tap. Now, I don't know if you've priced bottled water lately, but it isn't exactly cheap. In addition, the idea that we were constantly throwing away plastic bottles didn't set well with us. So, we decided to look into other options.
Our first try was to purchase a large bottle to keep in the fridge. This probably held three gallons of water and had a spout-like thing to pour water from. Well, we couldn't figure out how to make the spout work, so basically we decanted the water into pitchers and kept them all in the refrigerator. In other words, FAIL. Actually this plan failed for two reasons. The first is the obvious--three pitchers + the large container of water took up a lot of space. We lost basically 20% of the storage space in the fridge. The second, and less obvious, reason that this solution failed is that apparently I really prefer to drink water out of a bottle. Crazy, right? I think so, but during the two weeks that we tried out this solution, my water consumption went way down, and worse, my diet Coke consumption went way up! Now, it's normal for me to drink one or two cans of diet Coke in a day. While I aspire to drop it back down to zero, I think this is an acceptable amount for now. During our experiment, I drank four or five a day. That's not acceptable.
We moved on two Option 2, which has worked out incredibly well! Enter (cue choir of angels): the Filtrete Water Station! It is (for us) the perfect combination of filtered tap water and refrigerated bottled water. Basically, the Water Station is a unit that holds four bottles under one large filtered pool of water. You pour your water in at the top, it flows through the filter, then is diverted to empty bottles below. In a stroke of good fortune, when we decided to purchase ours through amazon.com, we found an option that included two additional bottles to use as spares. So now, we always have four bottles in the station and two additional bottles to take to work, throughout the house or to keep in the fridge. (I just checked, and that option doesn't appear to exist at amazon anymore, so I do think we got lucky). J and my bottled water consumption has gone back up (J even refills his at work using their filtered water system, which he never did before), and my diet Coke consumption has gone back down.
It will probably take us a month or two to make back our money on the Water Station, but we are drinking more water than before and cutting back on our diet Coke consumption (and spending), so I think it will even out pretty quickly. And, we no longer have that bad feeling about throwing away plastic bottles!
Note: We're hardly cool enough (i.e., we don't have nearly enough readers) to get free stuff from companies in exchange for positive reviews, but I feel obligated to make that very clear. We bought and paid for our Filtrete Water Station with our own money. I just wanted to share in a broader way (everyone I've spent more than five minutes with in the last week has heard about it, too) what a great solution this is for the MP. Now, if someone from Filtrete is reading this and wants to send me a filter or two to use when this one is exhausted (in about three months), I wouldn't say no. I'd even give you props for it! :)
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