In October 2024, I got an email from a reader worried about his water. A few weeks later, a second reader wrote to me. Then a third, a fourth, a fifth. They all had the same basic worry: that there was something harmful in their tap water. And they wanted my advice on what to do. As one reader, who I’ll call Jaime, put it: “I write to you out of desperation because I have been on a two-year journey to find the perfect filter, and it is amazing how difficult it’s been. I am willing to pay extra for quality and convenience, and even then it has been challenging. All I want is healthy water at home that I don’t have to think much about. Is that too much to ask :)?”Jaime explained that he had bought four filters in those two years: a Big Berkey followed by three different reverse-osmosis systems. One of them made the water taste worse. (“My kids call it the ‘onion water,’” he wrote.) He asked what filter I used at home. And I told him the same thing I tell all our readers: I don’t filter my water at all. I’ve now had my water lab-tested nearly a dozen times, in two homes, by six companies and an independent laboratory, for our guide to home water-quality test kits. Every result was the same: My water was virtually pristine. So I ditched my filter. As I write in the guide, “After all, it wasn’t really doing anything, since there wasn’t much of anything for it to do something about.”That’s true of a lot of US water supplies. But worries about water quality are on a lot of people’s minds. It was shocking when, in 2023, the US Geological Survey estimated that nearly half of the country’s drinking-water sources are tainted by PFAS — so-called forever chemicals. Suddenly, it seemed like contaminated tap water in your home was a matter of a coin flip. The desire to be rid of that fear is real, understandable, and widespread. You can become less afraid by knowing more — and that’s pretty easy to do.