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Skip Navigation LinksEPCOR / Learn & Explore / North Saskatchewan River / From River to Tap: Answering Your Water Questions

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As water experts and enthusiasts, we're pretty passionate about water. From river water to drinking water, we work hard to make sure it's all safe and healthy for everyone to enjoy.

As your water provider, we get a lot of questions about our water. Here are some of the common questions we hear.

How does EPCOR make our drinking water safe?

We get our drinking water from the North Saskatchewan River, which

is born from the snowy tops of the Canadian Rocky Mountains. But before the crisp H2O gets to your tap, we do our thing to make it safe and healthy for you to drink. Here are some of the highlights:  

 

Protecting our environment
means protecting our water

Find out about EPCOR's Source
Water Protection Plan
Find out more
 

  • We safely bring water from the river into our treatment plants. Our treatment plants have pipes deep in the river, designed to bring water into our plants while protecting fish.

  • ​​We deliver clean and safe water to thousands of customers. Your water spends about 7 to 15 hours being clarified, filtered and disinfected before it travels through underground pipes to your home.

  • We go above and beyond when it comes to testing our water. We test and adjust for hundreds of parameters, only 80 of which are required.

  • We continuously monitor the water we treat. Our water consistently meets or exceeds all the requirements set by provincial standards and Health Canada's Guidelines for Canadian Drinking Water Quality so you can enjoy a clean and safe glass of tap water.

  • We're kind of like water sommeliers. Our team of experts sniff the water regularly during all phases of the treatment process to detect any odours, especially during spring runoff. If needed, we adjust our treatment process to help remove any unwanted odours.

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​What's better: tap or bottled water?

There are a lot of reasons to stick with tap water.   

  • Tap water is subject to more stringent quality standards than bottled water. Our water meets or exceeds all federal and provincial standards, along with our own internal standards.
  • Bottled water can cost 1,000 times or more what tap water does. The cost of bottled water can range from around 20 cents to $2.50 per litre, while here in Edmonton, tap water costs 0.1955 cents per litre.
    * Tap water cost based on 2017 residential rate of $1.955/m3
  • It takes 3 litres of water to produce 1 litre of bottled water, according to the Pacific Institute of California. So why not buy that fancy reusable bottle you've been admiring to help conserve water and reduce waste?

​What happens after I flush the toilet?

Ensuring safe drinking water isn't our only priority.

Almost all of the water you flush down the toilet or send down the drain – 90%, in fact – eventually makes its way back to the river. But first, it makes a stop at our Gold Bar Wastewater Treatment Plant.

At Gold Bar, our team of operators makes sure this "wastewater" gets properly treated and tested, so it can be safely returned to the river for the fish, wildlife and communities downstream who depend on it, just like we do.

Making sure wastewater is clean and safe also helps ensure the river will be a place all of us can enjoy and explore for years to come.

Take a look at how it all happens.

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Think before you flush

What you flush down the toilet can create problems for your own pipes and for our environment. Learn what not to flush.

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