Plumber explains why family on city water kept getting sick

There are things you just don't know until you find out the hard way. While most people are taught the basics of housekeeping: sweeping, mopping, washing dishes and doing laundry, etc. everyone isn't taught all. There are inevitably going to be gaps that are left even when scrubbing a home from the tippy top to the bottom.

Some people aren't aware that they need to pull out the dryer to use a special tool to clean the lint from the back or front panel depending on where your lint trap is located. Other's weren't taught to wipe down baseboards when deep cleaning or to soak shower heads in a cleaning agent to remove buildup. It's completely normal to not know everything about living in your own home, and let's be honest, 18 years isn't long enough to ensure all knowledge is being passed down to children.

But one family's housekeeping oversight was the cause of them constantly getting sick and it's something that isn't common knowledge.

James Butler recently shared a video where he explains that his company was called out for a service call for a residence in the city, which was unusual because he normally services well water.

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"They were insistent that we come out and try to solve their problem. The problem was that people kept getting sick in the house. My first thought was take a vitamin but on further inspection we found the problem," he says before continuing. "See, in your house and pretty much everybody else's house, where the water comes out on your sink, there's something called an aerator. It does a variety of functions from slowing the flow of water to keeping grit out of your water and if you don't clean it, it looks like that."

The screen changes to the backside of a sink aerator filled with stuff that could sear into the back of your eyelids for the rest of your life haunting you every time you close your eyes. It was the aerator that the family's drinking water was passing through that looked like a grab bag of bacterial cultures dipped in micro organisms.

If you're appalled at the thought of drinking water filtering through whatever was growing on the back of that aerator, don't you worry, Butler shares what to do, "so if this video was a middle school history test, here's the cheat sheet. Go unscrew the aerator from your sink, soak it in bleach, clean it. I would say do it at least monthly."

People were thoroughly grossed out while also being thankful for the new information they have learned from the app with one person saying, "TikTok has show in me that I need to vacuum the insides of my dryer, never run my bathroom fan and clean my kitchen sink aerator. I have lived a long time and never knew any of this."

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"Omg I own a cleaning company my house is spotless. I’ve never thought to clean my aerator on the inside," someone else writes.

"I am putting THAT picture on the inside of my kitchen cabinet to remind myself to do it periodically," another shares.

"I'm convinced when it's our time it's our time cause how I'm supposed work, go to the gym, self care, wear sunscreen, take vitamins, drink water, mind my business and now, clean the facet alternator," one person laments.

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"Showed this to my husband, showed him the bottom our faucet (couldn’t get the aerator out), and pretty much immediately went out to buy another faucet. Better safe than sorry," someone else writes.

Well, now that everyone is thoroughly grossed out and running from room to room ripping out their faucets screaming about aerators, it's not the worst thing. Those little gadgets are fairly inexpensive for those who don't want to clean them every few months and if you didn't know cleaning an aerator was part of housekeeping chores, neither did many of the people who commented.