Rainwater is Chemical Free
Water, the universal solvent, dissolves it all, organic, inorganic, food and poison. It never discriminates, but our bodies do. And for that reason, nature distills it up into the skies to separate our misdeed from the natures good and rain it back down. A short spanned drizzle changes the shape of a dying plant. Rain water if collected properly is the water in its best form that we can receive from nature.
It wont be an exaggeration if I say that water in any form on earth is a degraded form of rainwater. Raindrops can be considered as the birth of water in the water cycle, and broadly speaking, from wherever we recieve our water supplies, it all starts with the rain. Groundwater, water from lakes, rivers, manmade water reservoirs, all these bodies recieve water from the rain. Since we fail to recollect the whole journey of the water supply we recieve at the tap and all that we are able to see is the visibly clean tapwater at home, we often consider it cleaner to the rainwater which is often imagined as muddy puddles and filthy gutters . We fail to understand that if try to get a clean catchment for the rainwater, it is a much better health option than municipal water.
When vaya, a resident of Barisbhan , a small village in the state of Bihar, was daignosed with skin lesions and skin hardening, doctors shed all the blame to the higher arsenic levels in the groundwater of that area. Since then, vaya has been drinking boiled rainwater as a health preference. Similar issue was faced by Ranu, a resident of a posh locality in Delhi, who fell victim to a damaged RO purifier membrane. By the time he could recognize the fault in purification system, his digestive system had succumbed to the polluted water supplies. It was then that he switched to cleanly harvested rainwater for drinking purposes.
If rainwater is so pure then why is it not on our preference charts? A number of factors have contributed to the low profile of the super pure rainwater. Major reason is the availability, rainwater is not available through the year. And storing rainwater to meet annual potable demand requires a bit of maintainance. Apart from this, the doubt on the atmospheric contamination of the rains has always pulled people back from considering rainwater as a potable option. Therefore experts often recommend not to consider rainwater for drinking if you live in close proximity of en industry releasing atmospheric effluents. Ironically, if you consider that the nearby industry has polluted the rain, then the liquid effluents have made way to you water supplies much earlier.
Anytime rainwater is softer than the tap water because the latter is treated with chemicals such as chlorine. In fact if treated sewage in making way to your homes then you can imagine the form of chemical treatement your water supply has undergone.
We still recommend getting a sample testing of your municipal water supply and the rainwater you recieve to make a better personal judgement. We carried out a few experiments at personal level, and would like to share our takeaways with our readers:
-Rainwater is as clean as the vessel you recieve and store it in.
-It is definitely cleaner than municipal water supply.
-Make sure that the rain is directly falling on your vessel or tank and not through some tree or building.
-Once stored it is just a few boils away from being good enough to drink.
As a personal note, we recomment rainwater as a remedy to ailments of all sort. Of course we boil it, filter it, like we do for the regular tapwater but it doesnt need reverse osmosis as it is already pure. We always keep a pot of rainwater for our plants under the porch that miss the showers often. Share your experiences with rainwater drinking in the comments below!