•How to Clean and Sanitize
Your Bottled Water Cooler
Here are some easy steps to follow to make sure your bottled water cooler
is clean and ready
for your great tasting DrinkMore Bottled Water. Make sure you follow
the necessary precautions for
a Hot & Cold Cooler. Before you start, you'll need the following:
1. Thirty minutes of time!
2. Clean rubber gloves
3. Lint-free towel or lint-free paper towels
4. Clean container that can hold a gallon or two
5. Unscented household bleach (just a tiny bit!)
6. A small cork or plug if you have a hot & cold cooler
For all Coolers:
1. Disconnect cooler power cord from outlet.
2. Clean/Wash cooler exterior & faucets with hot water and mild
soap. Dry with paper towels.
3. Remove the bottle from your cooler (it's best to do this when the
bottle is empty) and drain reservoir
thru the cold water (blue) faucet into a bucket and throw that away
or give it to your dog.
(If there is ice in the reservoir, allow to melt and then drain. Add
hot water to speed up this process.)
4. Remove the water guard or spill-free top from your cooler. Remove
the baffle inside the reservoir as well.
Both should just pull right out, depending upon the model cooler you
have. (If there is ice in the reservoir,
allow to melt and then drain. Add hot water to speed up this process.)
5. Wash these with mild dish soap and water. (In a sink works great!)
Rinse with clean water and set aside.
IF YOU HAVE A HOT & COLD COOLER, YOU MUST DO THIS NEXT:
IMPORTANT: If yours is a hot
& cold cooler, then you must plug the hot tank off. You can
do this with a small cork
(we have them available) or plug. It has to be snug and it fits right
in the center hole in the bottom
of the cooler's reservoir. The reason you have to do this is to prevent
sanitizer from getting into your hot tank.
The hot tank sanitizes itself since it's very hot!! If bleach gets into
the hot tank,
your hot water will taste like chlorine for many days to follow.
6. Prepare a sanitizing solution consisting of one gallon of clean water
andone teaspoon of unscented bleach.
Do not use any more than that! Put on your clean rubber gloves and dip
a clean, lint-free towel into the
solution and wring out the excess liquid. Now, take that towel and thoroughly
clean all of interior surfaces of
the reservoir. Make sure that hot tank is plugged off!
Let that sanitizing solution stay in the cooler for about 5 minutes.
7. Sanitize spill-free top and baffle by wiping them down with the
towel saturated with the sanitizing solution.
You don't need to soak them, just wipe them. Don't get the little air
filter wet!! Allow to sit for at least
3 minutes and then rinse profusely with clean bottled water - like about
a gallon and set aside.
8. Fill reservoir full of fresh bottled water and completely drain
that water thru the cold faucet.
Now, do it again - fill the reservoir with bottled water and drain through
the cold faucet.
We recommend doing the same thing for a third time, just to make sure
all of the chlorine bleach is gone!
That's about three gallons of bottled water through the cold faucet.
9. Put on a clean pair of rubber gloves and take out the hot tank cork
(if you put one in),
replace the baffle and spill-free top assembly by pressing firmly into
place. Place a bottle on the cooler and
drain two cups of water from each faucet (hot, room temp, and cold).
You shouldn't have any chlorine taste.
If you do, keep draining more water until the taste disappears.
Plug the cooler back in - it'll take thirty minutes of so before the
water is hot and/or cold!
If you have any questions about any of the above, please email us at:
ed@drinkmoreretail.com
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•Why not just drink the tap
water?
You can certainly do just that. The local tap water usually meets federally
mandated guidelines for
drinking water and it’s certainly less expensive than bottled water.
However, it has many impurities in it.
It has chemicals – like chlorine – added to it. And many people
don’t enjoy the way it tastes.
I always get a laugh from the water that restaurants
serve. Nice restaurants always pride themselves on the quality of
their food, but they always start you off (or at least most of the time)
with a glass of water straight from the tap.
It can taste awful. Makes you wonder how good their food is going to
be.
Tap water is obviously a very important service provided
to the community. It’s used to help fight fires,
wash clothes, flush toilets, water lawns and take showers. The problem
is that every single gallon of tap water
must meet minimum standards. The local authorities don’t know whether
you’re going to drink a particular
gallon or flush it down the toilet. So every gallons need to meet the
minimum standards. Did you know
that we drinkless than ½ of one percent of all the tap water
produced?
It is true that you can save money by using tap vs.
bottled water. But when 70% of your body is compromised
of water and water is vital to your quality of life - then you should
treat yourself and choose the best, choose
the highest purity, choose DrinkMore! (You can still use the tap water
to wash your car and take a shower!)
•Why should I drink DrinkMore Purified Water
instead of Spring Water?
That’s easy – because it’s so much healthier for you.
We take out all of the impurities typically found in
spring water and tap water, so you know exactly what you’re getting
– pure and fresh H2O every time.
Spring waters fluctuate in quality because the aquifers from which they
emanate are constantly in a state of change.
Haven’t you wondered why spring water companies
never talk about purity? The reason is that they
can’t compete with us on purity. They want to talk about “natural”
– let’s get something straight – the Potomac River is
“natural” but I certainly wouldn’t scoop out a big glass
and drink it. And neither would you. You’ve also heard
how spring water sources are in “protected areas”. The reality
is that springs are recharged via the
hydrologic cycle – evaporation (cloud formation) and then condensation
(rain) etc. and rain is how the atmosphere
is cleansed of its contaminants. It’s obvious that even remote
areas (like the Adirondack Mountains) receive
tremendous amounts of acid rain and other contaminants. The geology
of the area can help filter out
some of those contaminants and add others. But to say that spring water
is pure is purely marketing hyperbole.
Many people drink spring water because they simply don’t
know how to choose which water to drink.
Our job at Drinkmore is to give you the knowledge and tools to make
an educated decision.
Why do people buy bottled water – some buy for convenience, but
most buy it because they think it’s higher in
purity than tap water. That’s not always the case with spring water
– in fact, there are some spring waters
that have so many impurities that they wouldn’t even meet the tap
water standards in this country.
Think of it this way – your body is an extremely
complex filtering system. Why put things into that system
that you simply don’t have to? Things like nitrates, bromates,
metals, inorganic chemicals, sodium, etc.
The purer your water, the less filtering you need to do.
If you want to make a true comparison between our purified
water and their spring water,
ask them for a copy of their complete bottled water analysis. That’s
apparently tougher for them to find than a deer tick.
We start with tap water that meets all federal standards
for potability – that’s where we start.
When we’re done, our purified water meets purity standards that
are far higher than any spring water can achieve.
That FDA standard is called “Purified Water”. Spring waters
can’t hold a candle to that standard.
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•What about home filter systems and the little
filters you put on your faucet or put into a pitcher?
Portable filtration systems take one step toward improving the quality
of the water you drink,
but they are just that – a first step. One of the basic tenets
of DrinkMore Water is that the purer the water,
the better (LINK to The DrinkMore Story). The primary filtering component
found in most portable
filtration systems are activated carbon granules. These carbon granules
reduce, but don’t completely eliminate
chemicals such as chlorine, VOC's (Volatile Organic Compounds), and
THM (trihalomethanes). Some contain
additional material that can kill bacteria or at least filter it out.
Carbon filtration systems can reduce or remove
chlorine whether chlorine is reduced or removed depends on the quality
of the system. The removal of chlorine
improves the taste and smell of your water, but other impurities are
tasteless and odorless and could
still be present. DrinkMore Water’s purification process combines
3-stages of carbon filtration with 7 other
purification technologies including ion exchange and reverse osmosis.
The result is 99.9% pure bottled water-
the purest on the market .
•So why should you switch?
For your health of course! The human body is comprised of approximately
70% water.
Water is essential to almost all the processes which take place in your
body. You can go months without
food, but even a day without water and your health begins to deteriorate.
Given the importance of
water to your well-being, we believe that it only makes sense to choose
the purest,
most high-quality water – choose DrinkMore Water.
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•Do I need minerals in my water?
Another great question. Let’s start with what exactly are minerals?
Minerals are inorganic
substances (such as rocks and similar matter) found in the earth strata,
as opposed to organic substances
such as plant and animal matter. Some familiar minerals are what we
think of as “good minerals” – things like
calcium, magnesium and potassium. There are also “not so good”
minerals – at least as far as the human body
is concerned – things like lead, arsenic, antimony, aluminum, barium,
etc. So, we begin with
the knowledge that all minerals aren’t necessarily good for you.
As you saw in the above definition of mineral, minerals
are inorganic substances (like rocks).
There is considerable debate in the scientific community as to the usefulness
of these inorganic minerals
in the human diet. You can get calcium from rocks mined from the earth
or you can get it from dairy products
and fruits and vegetables. That’s calcium from an organic source.
The body can absorb nutrients (like calcium)
from organic sources very well. It is much, much less efficient to get
your minerals from inorganic sources
because the body can’t absorb them as well. (That’s why you
hear stories about vitamin pills
passing right through your body undissolved – because they are
tough little rocks that the body cannot process quickly).
Milk, cheese and oranges get processed very quickly.
So, back to the issue of minerals in your water. Do
you really need them? From the above information,
you could conclude that the inorganic minerals sometimes found in water
(both tap water and spring water)
aren’t very useful to the body. But another question is how much
of those minerals are even in the water?
Not very much with respect to what the body needs.
For example, let’s take a famous spring water (famously
expensive!) from the French Alps–
it has around 35 milligrams per liter of calcium in it. The minimum
Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA)
for an average person is 1,000 milligrams per day. If you have degenerative
bone issues, you’ll want to be
higher than that (older persons are encouraged to get 1,200 milligrams
per day). So, if the inorganic calcium
from your spring water were able to be processed 100% efficiently by
the human body (which it cannot),
it would take 28.57 liters of water (1,000 milligrams divided by 35
milligrams per liter
(calcium in the French Alp water) to get your minimum daily allowance
of calcium. That’s more than 7 gallons a day!!!
That is only half of the answer. In addition, not every
mineral is good for you. Mother Nature, when
she deposited all of these minerals didn’t bless one area with
all of the good minerals and curse another
area with all of the bad minerals. They’re laid down together.
So with the good, come the bad.
At DrinkMore Water, our philosophy is to make sure
that you don’t get any of the bad minerals and contaminants.
We make very pure water. It tastes better because it’s pure.
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•Why does DrinkMore Water taste so much better
than spring water?
Much higher purity, period. With our water, you taste nothing but pure
water. With spring waters,
you get these various tastes associated with all of things found in
their waters. All of the impurities found
in each different spring water make up a cocktail of taste. You might
like one type and strongly dislike another.
It’s based upon how those molecular impurities taste to your taste
buds. You simply don’t have that problem
with our water. It’s always clean, crisp and pure – the same
thing every time. Beautiful!
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•Should I worry about lead in the tap water?
Lead in tap water is such a huge health problem in this area that it
cannot be stressed enough how important
it is that you NEVER drink water that you suspect has lead in it. Lead
and many other heavier metals
do not readily leave the body. Once you ingest it, it’s yours forever.
If you want the details on
exactly what lead will do to you, do a search on “health problems
of lead in tap water”. If you suspect you have
lead in your water, get it tested ASAP! And until you get the results,
drink bottled water!!!!!
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•How does lead get into the water supply?
There are several different ways lead can get into the water supply.
The most important thing to understand
is that when water leaves the treatment plant, it does not have lead
in it. Once it travels through the pipes
to get to your home is when it may appear. It may be from a lead connector
pipe that connects your home pipe
to the city pipe or from lead solder used in older copper plumbing (pre-1986).Lead
can even leach into the
water supply from older brass faucets and fixtures,because lead used
to be used in the manufacturing process to make brass.
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•Does your water have fluoride in it?
That is a great question and the answer is long – but please read
it all! The short answer is no.
There are many people who think fluoride is the best thing since sliced
bread and there many people
who think that fluoride is so toxic it will kill. Everyone agrees, however,
that too much fluoride is definitely
a very bad thing. The FDA has set a maximum contaminant level for fluoride
in bottled water–
that’s how concerned everyone is about getting too much of it.
Here are a couple of interesting points. First, fluoride
is a prescription drug that you cannot buy at the
drug store unless prescribed by a doctor. That has always made us wonder
why the local water authorities
are able to put it into the tap water in the first place. There is fluoride
in most toothpastes but the amount of
fluoride in toothpaste has dropped by more than 85% during the last
fifteen years. Why? Because people were
getting too much of it. When you get too much of it, your teeth can
begin to mottle (turn brown) and
fluoride can make your bones more brittle.
On the other hand, most dentists and the American Dental
Association recommend fluoride toothpaste,
fluoride treatments, etc. Who is right and who is wrong? We don’t
pretend to know. We just know
that you should have a choice about it. Do your own research to draw
your own conclusions.
Type “fluoride dangers” and then “fluoride benefits”
into your friendly search engine. Read all about it.
If you conclude you an/or your children want more fluoride,
you should probably get a prescription
written by your doctor so that you can give EXACTLY the right amount.
Children have much smaller
blood volumes than adults, so they don’t need the same amount or
the same concentration.
Finally, fluoride (in almost every form) tastes absolutely
awful. The only reason you don’t taste it in
tap water is because of all of the other impurities in tap water that
mask its taste.
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•How do we ensure the consistency and purity
of DrinkMore Water?
First of all, our purification and bottling facility is regularly inspected
by
the FDA, the Maryland Dept. of Health and Hygiene (that’s the state
Health Department)
and the Montgomery County, MD Health Department.
Second, ours is a purification and manufacturing process
that positively reduces contaminants
along the way. There are several sensors and monitors in our system
which eliminates any possibility
of contamination or substandard water. Our consistency and quality is
legendary. If you have a chance,
you should come by and take a plant tour!
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•Do you carry glass bottles?
Glass bottles present all sorts of problems – from their extra
weight to their inherent brittleness
and breakability and finally the issue when a bottle does break (as
they always do) the glass shards
are virtually invisible in the water.
If you are wondering about plastics leaching into the
water then please read on. Any kind of plastic is
susceptible to leaching into the water. Polycarbonate is a much harder
plastic than PET, therefore the leach rates
are much lower. The only container that doesn't leach anything into
the water is glass - which is not
widely available because of the danger factors mentioned above.
The reality is that the leach rates from polycarbonate
are far below government guidelines. There were
a few kooky studies (that have never been able to be replicated by anyone
other than the original author)
that said that leaching was a major issue with certain types of bottles.
Those studies have been
discredited numerous times but internet links remain.
One of the building blocks of polycarbonate is a plastic
called bisphenol-a. If you’re highly inquisitive or
have a scientific background, I would suggest that you visit the following
website.
It has a ton of real,scientifically verifiable info on the topic:
http://www.bisphenol-a.org/
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•Do your bottles have built-in handles?
Yes! We have always used bottles with handles. In fact, we were the
very first water company in
the country to provide them exclusively to every single customer! They
are simply the best – easy
and convenient for everyone. Bottles with handles not only help to prevent
back injuries,
but they also greatly reduce bacteria from forming around the neck of
the bottle.
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