A microbiologist has put an old rumour that water from garden hoses is safe to drink to the test – with surprising results.
Nicholas Aicher, who works as a senior quality control analyst, regularly goes viral sharing clips testing the cleanliness of various everyday items with his 440,000 followers.
In a recent clip, which garnered over 800,000 views, he tested the amount of bacterial in a sample of water from his own garden hose.
READ MORE: Harvard-educated doctor says there is plastic showing up in our BRAINS
“I thought it would be fun for people to know all the little nastiness that we don’t think about every day,” the Chicago-based content creator told What’s The Jam of why he shares his experiments online.
In the video, Nicholas poses the question ‘How dirty is a garden hose?’ – questioning if the “older folk” are right about it being perfectly safe to drink from.
The microbiologist can be seen taking a sample of water from his hose, taking it to the lab to test it for bacteria.
The samples, held in a petri dish, are incubated before he checks them.
Incredibly, Nicholas found no sign of bacteria and declared: “Looks like the hose is good to go!”
The post garnered 100,000 likes and thousands of comments.
One person wrote: “Hose water is so damn good.”
“Drank unfiltered rain water and got sick for over a week upset stomach, puke, no appetite, fever. Hose water never got sick,” another user reported.
Another viewer said: “That’s also why Gen X wasn’t sick much.”
“I mean I survived and I put my whole mouth on that spout,” someone else added.
Another follower commented: “That’s why you have an immune system.”
Nicholas previously made headlines after putting the infamous ‘five second rule’ to the test – finding out if it is safe to eat food after it has fallen on the floor.
Trying out a range of different amounts of time for the fallen food to be on the floor, he found that regardless of if it has just dropped, or has been lying around for a minute, the food will be “nasty” from the contamination.
READ MORE: IVF doctor shows how to spot bad ‘swimmers’ with simple test
