The tap water is perfectly drinkable in my city but I was raised to drink boiled water coming from a Chinese family. Water straight from the tap tastes disgusting to me.

It's super strange for me to only drink bottled water/filtered abroad.

I've visited Peru and when I said to locals that we drink tap water directly they just didn't believe. It was unthinkable to them. And the bottled water was not cheap there...

I'm Portuguese

Netherlands - we have some of the cleanest tap water here. You can drink water from any tap. Ironically bottled water from the shops is a big seller here and you see people with liters of the stuff in shopping trolleys and I’ve never been able to figure out why anyone would spend money on something that we have an abundance of in our houses

In the UK they had separate taps for hot and cold because the cold was safe to drink and the hot was not.

In USA yes, we drink tap water without boiling as long as we're in an area with safe tap water (most of the population) and not using our own untreated/untested well water. Every once in a while we get alerted to local unsafe tap water. We have a filter on the tap water but haven't always.

US/Canada here as well as someone that has visited most of western Europe (UK, France, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland) and stayed in hostels - no boiling necessary in any of these places.

There's actually a pervasive myth I've encountered that hot tap water is dangerous and that one should only drink cold water. As far as I'm aware, this myth is due to an old setup for water systems that many western homes had before modern taps. The tap was separated into separate cold/hot faucets. The cold water came safely from the city, but the hot water came from tanks that were stored in people's attics. The water in these tanks sat stagnant and was therefore prone to rats and other creatures dying in it or bacteria building up. This is why still today, most British homes have separate hot/cold taps - to keep the "safe" water separate from the "dangerous" water. I occasionally encountered such taps in the US and I assume that's why my dad raised me to make sure the water was cold before drinking it. My father's understanding of this was clearly outdated though. I learned all of this from a Tom Scott video.

Australia here, yes most people drink it without boiling but it depends a little what region you’re in. Some bits of the fat north or some island towns, you may be better off boiling it. Lots of people in the city use built in filter taps but I kind of write that off as con job.

I'm in the US. I don't know too many people that drink directly from the tap. Almost everyone I know passes the water through a filter first.

Although, technically, I think the water is safe to drink. My city sends little informational cards saying how they've tested the water and it should be good to drink straight from the tap.

I think we in the US scare easy, so I'm guessing Big Water Bottle and Big Filter have brainwashed us into being scared to drink straight from the tap.

Believe it or not New York City has some of the best water in the state if not the country. I live outside of the city, and while I can drink from the tap, we prefer to use a filtered water pitcher, but we don’t boil first.

I live in the US, I use a reverse osmosis filter and then boil the water

Is boiling the tap water just like superstition or what? or is it really not treated/cleaned by the local water authority to be fit for human consumption? Just curious what people think the benefit is, because in the US and Europe from what I know, we treat our public water so that it can, you know, be used by the public safely?

I never drink water out of the tap because I prefer to filter it first. It’s safe to drink but I want it clean and much colder so into a filter pitcher and put that in the fridge

In the US you can typically drink from the tap but I would advise not, some areas are really bad to drink from the tap, but you should always have a filter at the very least. boiling isn't so necessary.

I once visted Austria (Innsbruck to be precise) and the water there was so incredible straight from the tap. It would be ice cold, so fresh and clean. I think they have the best water in the world there.