Chlorine in tap water?

[kelemvor]

I've got an off topic question for you guys. I noticed when rinsing my test container after a chlorine test yesterday that the tap water lit up the DPD pretty bright and so I decided to test the tap water for chlorine.

Found 3.5ppm fc and 0ppm cc. The county here adds chloramines to the water but say they stopped adding chlorine in 2002.

So my questions are for some of you chem guys... 1. do chloramines show up as chlorine in the dpd-fas (taylor 2006) test, and either way 2. is 3.5ppm in my drinking water something I should be worried about (i.e. calling the county and complaining).

I typically drink bottled water (especially the variety with added hops), so I'm not super worried about my health if it is a problem; but my pets drink tap water...

County water faq: http://www.pinellascounty.org/utilities/chloramines-faq.htm

[chem geek]

There is some chloramine bleed-through to the FC test that can happen at high levels, but my tap water has 1.2 ppm monochloramine that doesn't show up as FC and only shows up as CC after I add the R-0003 reagent.

I'd dilute the water with distilled water and see if it still bleeds through. If it doesn't, then there is apparently a high chlorine level in your tap water and not monochloramine. And yes, 3.5 ppm is high for either though the EPA limit (http://water.epa.gov/drink/contaminants/index.cfm) for chlorine (FC) is 4 ppm and for monochloramine (CC) it is also a 4 ppm limit. So technically they are in compliance, but it's probably higher than necessary.