Next to the wall, near the head of my dining table, is a hot and cold bottled water dispenser. I honestly don't know how much it cost when my wife bought it in 2006, but I think it was made in China and I'm sure it wasn't expensive. It says "Nova" on the front of it — what a generic sounding name. Anyway, it no longer works right and I'm going to have to buy a replacement… eventually.

The Water Cooler

This is what the cold water dispensers are typically called when you hear them referenced in movies and TV shows, usually when it's about gossip at the water cooler. I heard people calling the bottled water dispensers water coolers at my last place of employment.

Ironically, it's not the cold water cooling part of my dispenser that seems to be having issues. It's the hot water dispenser. It dispenses the water fine, but the air bubbles don't float to the top of the water bottle like they should and I basically have to spin the water bottle to coerce it into action, or else I can only get like half a cup of water out of it. I guess I can deal with it until I have enough money set aside from my personal budget to replace it.

The Cost of Bottled Water

I can't complain about the cost of bottled water. The people that distribute live on the other end of the street. It's delivered whenever we want it and it costs two hundred pesos for five bottles (less than USD $5.00), each containing five gallons of purified water. They use the exact same water filtration setup I had in my home in the US for 12 years – A multi-stage filtration system followed by a reverse osmosis filtering system at the tap.

I don't remember how much the services like "Crystal" or "Sparkletts" in the US (and I think Crystal belonged to Sparkletts, just using different names in different areas of the US because their advertising jingle was almost the same) used to cost, because it's been more than 25 years since I saw one of their trucks making a delivery to my parents' home.

Drink tap water? No way!

The water delivered to our home from the Subic Water District is extremely hard water. I know this not only because of the taste, but because of the hard water stains which have magically appeared in our toilets and sinks. It's difficult to remove and there are still remnants of stains. I also think they add too much of whatever chemical they're using to kill bacteria with because the hard minerals by themselves really don't affect the taste enough to be noticeable (in my opinion).

One of my brothers-in-law made me a cup of coffee one morning and it tasted like sh*t. I asked him where he got the water from since I already knew the coffee was good – it was my own instant coffee. When he told me he used tap water, I asked him why he didn't use the water from my bottled water dispenser. He pleaded ignorance because he couldn't taste the difference – he was used to drinking the tap water.

Getting a Replacement Hot and Cold Bottled Water Dispenser

The dispenser we currently use is a freestanding type – it sits on the floor and is tall enough that I only need to bend over slightly to use it. It has some oddball switches and knobs on it and I never use them. The two switches are for turning the hot and cold water areas off or on. The knob is supposed to provide a form of air conditioning to the lower cabinet, but it's on a 60-minute timer. What it could be used for, I'll never figure out.

The replacement I buy won't have any strange doodads on it. My wife picked the last one and I'm picking the next one. The dispenser is three and half years old and will probably last to four before I replace it. My mother has one, made by GE, that's been in service for at least 25 years and still works like it did when it was new. It used to be that "Made in Japan" meant it was cheaply made and I think that attribution now goes to Chinese products (but not all of them).

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