Water: aluminum, plastic and glass. Does the taste change?

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Plastic makes a difference alright. I refuse to use milk that has been in a plastic container on my breakfast because it make it taste of plastic. Plastic milk...plastic water...YUK.

It also makes a difference to food and as a result ready meals are cooked in a pottery dish or they taste disgusting if cooked in the plastic container you are meant to use.

We were considering going over from Brita cartridges to those huge containers of purified water, just to make life a little easier. We were fed up of filling the little jug all the time, and the in-line filters simply leaked all over the place. But we could hardly believe the price difference. Filtering your own is a lot cheaper, even when the tap water is full of limescale which wastes most of the filter's capacity. Personally I can't taste any difference (unless the chlorine hasn't had enough time to evaporate), but I'm a little concerned about heavy metals etc., so that's why I prefer filtering.

Don't get me started about cook-in-the-bag food. Wouldn't touch it with a barge pole.

I used a Brita pitcher before the town added the RO filter. In-line filters do not normally leak any more than plumbing does. If they do, repairs are better than despair. It is not unusual for a farm to have two or three stages of treatment for their well water.

Yeah, I never cook anything in plastic. There are two categories of this. One is pre-made frozen meals you are told to cook either in a microwave or conventional oven. Don't. Tip the contents into a real pan or casserole dish or something, and cook them that way.

The other category is the hifalutin' sous vide cooking technique. Prefab foods are low-rent, sous vide is haute cuisine, but I still don't want to eat it. Plastic leaches contaminants into your food and especially does so when heated.

Yes, if the connections are done properly they won't leak. Ours was the type that screws onto the end of the tap. I can't remember whether the problem was mismatch or bad design, but we couldn't find an easy fix, so it was simpler to go over to the jug type. I don't suppose it made much difference to the labour cost.

One thing we discovered was that (for our water) the maker's estimated filter capacity was way too optimistic. They must have used soft water for their tests. I was surprised because it's unusual for a manufacturer to understate how often a consumable should be renewed. I get the impression that a soft water supply isn't that common - certainly everywhere I've lived has had hard water. And a non-technically minded user would have no way of knowing when the filter was expired. Luckily for me, most of our filtered water goes into a kettle and gets boiled, so it's just a matter of watching out for the first traces of limescale in that. We also got one of those push-button counter things so we can easily keep count of the number of fills of the jug. In our case we get about 50 fills out of a cartridge, and that always correlates well with the limescale in the kettle.

It's often struck me that we could cut the cost dramatically if we had a cheap way of removing the calcium before putting it through the Brita filter. I'm sure they used to have very cheap anion and cation exchange resins in our school chemistry department, and those could be regenerated very easily with HCl and NaOH. But I foresee 3 possible problems:
1. It might turn out that the calcium has to be exchanged for sodium, which would waste the Brita filter's capacity just as much.
2. The resin itself, being plastic, might leach out some toxin that's as dangerous as the heavy metals we're ultimately trying to remove.
3. Vendors would probably laugh at my ideas and try to push me into buying into something much more expensive, without clearly explaining why I should, and it seems unlikely that the things I wanted would be readily available off the peg.

That probably explains why I haven't pursued my idea any further yet. But I'd love to know what, if anything, is wrong with it.

Whole-house water filters are often regenerated using salt. That was a seasonal chore on dad's farm.

As soon as the ME/CFS and a couple other neurological, mitochondrial, musculoskeletal, diseases get cured I'll do that.

Trust a farmer to have figured out the most cost-effective way Sounds like the calcium would be replaced by sodium then, which I guess would scupper my method of extending the life of the Brita filters. I suspect that if hydrochloric acid is used, it would "work" but it would then render the water acidic, and I don't know what the effect of that would be on the effectiveness of a Brita filter, or whether the buffering capacity of human saliva would be enough to prevent tooth decay from the acidity of the water.

Dad took out the sulphur by spraying the deep well water to trickle down the rocks of an old dug well. The subsequent water softener was a store-bought item that is still popular.
Many neighbours didn't bother, including one restaurant at a gas station. The local sport was to watch a tourist taste their coffee, while drinking sodas.

First off no need for apologies pertaining to your language difficulties, as I never really had such a strange tendency; however, my sister would never drink something from glass as, I could never understand such.