I'm sorry you're having all those problems and you hate your life. I hope everything gets better soon.


If your water had become seriously contaminated -- with raw sewage, for example -- it would take more than boiling to make it fit to drink and more than 24 hours of normal use to get the crud out of the pipes. The precautions they're actually taking suggest that they think some plain old dirt might have got into the pipes while they were working on them, so they can't guarantee for those 24 hours that the water will be fully up to drinking-water standards. If you've ever swum in a river or lake, the water there almost certainly didn't meet drinking-water standards either. If you fill a bathtub with drinking-quality water, that water, too, will fail to meet the standards the moment a person gets in the tub.

If you don't want to boil your dishwater, you can sanitize your dishes with chlorine bleach after washing. The recommended concentration is about 100 parts per million (ppm) of chlorine, or one tablespoon of liquid bleach in two gallons of water. You wash and rinse the dishes as usual, then dip them in the solution and let them drip dry.

You don't need strictly drinking-quality water for washing clothes. Besides, the heat in the dryer will kill most kinds of nasties that may still be in the clothes after washing.

Good luck!