Nothing exciting has ever happened to our water.

It starts in Gokarna.

A catchment inside Gokarna forest — protected land on the quiet side of the valley. No industry, no drains, no traffic. About as far from Kathmandu's noise as you can get and still be in it.

The chlorine result above is part of why we can say that. At under 0.2 mg/L there's essentially none in the water, which is what you'd expect from a forest catchment rather than a municipal line.

The law says four times a year.

We test every other day.

Nepal requires processed drinking water to be tested quarterly by an accredited laboratory. That's four tests a year, and the report above is our latest one — done by the government's own reference lab, which is where the bacteria testing happens.

In between, we run our own checks in the plant every alternate day. Twelve of them:

Appearance · Odour · Taste · Turbidity · Conductivity · pH · TDS · Total hardness · Total alkalinity · Ammonia · Iron · Phosphate

Roughly 180 rounds a year against the four the law asks for. Not because anyone requires it, but because a quarterly certificate tells you about one day in ninety.

Bacteria testing needs a laboratory and time to culture, so that's the quarterly accredited test. The twelve above are what we can check ourselves, and what would show up first if anything changed. Ammonia and phosphate, for instance, are contamination indicators — watching for them every other day on a forest source is specifically looking for the things that matter.