Questions & answers

About the data

Where do the values on maunawai.info come from?

From the mandatory publications of the water suppliers. Every operator of a central water supply installation must make its current analysis results available on the internet in accordance with § 46 TrinkwV — usually as a PDF analysis report or a table on its own website. We read out these documents and present the values unchanged, with a link to the original document, the issue date of the report and the retrieval date. For Austria, the values come from the Österreichische Trinkwasserdatenbank of the Ministry of Health, ÖVGW and AGES, to which suppliers report voluntarily; for Switzerland from the SVGW platform trinkwasser.ch, for Italy from the publications of the Gestori under D.Lgs. 18/2023.

Is the information official?

No. maunawai.info is a private information service and structures publicly accessible data. The supplier's original publication, which is linked at every value, is always authoritative. Binding monitoring of drinking water is the responsibility of the health authorities; binding information is provided by your supplier and the authority responsible for you.

How current are the values?

Most suppliers publish their analyses annually, typically in the first quarter; some quarterly or more often. Under § 46 Trinkwasserverordnung, the values provided in Germany may not be more than one year old. We check the sources monthly for new issues. Each value shows the issue date of the report and the date on which we retrieved it — we take the issue date from the document itself, not from the file name, because in practice the latter is often out of date.

Why can't I find my postcode?

Because we do not yet have a verified assignment for it. Currently recorded are 6,023 German and 863 Austrian postcodes with 475,051 measured values from 3,087 suppliers; the data set grows every month. Where we have nothing, we show nothing: no approximations, no placeholders, no values from a neighbouring zone. Some of the gaps have a different reason — some suppliers technically exclude automated reading of their website, and we do not take over data against the stated wishes of the provider. In that case this is noted on the postcode page, with a link to the supplier's original analyses.

What do the hardness ranges soft, medium and hard mean?

It indicates how much calcium and magnesium is dissolved in the water. The classification comes from the German Wasch- und Reinigungsmittelgesetz and serves the dosing of detergents: soft below 8,4 °dH, medium 8,4 to 14 °dH, hard above that. The hardness range is not a quality judgement — there is no parametric value for water hardness in the Trinkwasserverordnung.

Is there a parametric value for PFAS in drinking water?

Yes. A parametric value of 0.1 µg/l has applied to the sum of 20 individual PFAS substances since 12 January 2026. From 12 January 2028, a stricter parametric value of 0.02 µg/l additionally applies to the PFAS-4 subgroup; whether it is complied with cannot be derived from a published sum value for PFAS-20. Where a water supplier publishes PFAS values, we display them with this context. A value below the limit of quantification is not equivalent to “PFAS-free”.

What does "below the limit of quantification" mean?

The limit of quantification is the smallest content a laboratory can reliably quantify with the method used. If the report states "< 0,01 µg/l", this means: below this limit the substance was not quantified. That is neither a zero nor proof of absence. We therefore reproduce such entries verbatim and never convert them into a number; the share-of-the-parametric-value column then shows an upper limit instead of a bar.

What does it mean if a value is above the parametric value?

An exceedance of a parametric value is a notifiable event monitored by the health authorities. It does not automatically mean a health risk: the statutory parametric values contain safety margins, and the assessment in each individual case is the responsibility of the competent authority. We show exceedances as they appear in the source document, with the date and with the supplier's remark, provided one has been added. Values below the parametric value are considered harmless, even just below it.

Why does it say for lead that the building installation is not covered?

Because our data ends at the waterworks or at the supply zone. Today lead comes almost exclusively from old building installations, not from the supplier's network. The parametric value is currently 10 µg/l and will drop to 5 µg/l on 12 January 2028; remaining lead pipes must be replaced under the Trinkwasserverordnung. Information on the installation in the building is provided by owners or the property management; certainty comes from an examination by an accredited laboratory or the responsible health authority.

How reliable is the automated evaluation of the analysis reports?

The values are transferred from the reports by an AI language model — it reads, it does not interpret: entries such as “< 0.001” or “not detectable” remain verbatim, while unit conversion and parameter assignment are handled afterwards by fixed program code. Every document is evaluated twice independently; discrepancies and conspicuous values go to a human review and only appear after approval. In the validation before launch, 98.6 % of more than 1,100 spot-checked fields from 26 documents were correct. Errors remain possible — in case of doubt, the linked original applies.

Who operates maunawai.info, and does that influence the presentation?

The operator is MAUNAWAI Schweiz GmbH, which manufactures water filters. We do not hide this interest but work against it: no product advertising in the data area, no purchase recommendation derived from a measured value, no linking of analysis results to products. And the honest overall assessment up front: in Europe, tap water is among the most strictly monitored foodstuffs, well over 99 % of all samples comply with the parametric values. This portal exists because the published data is hard to find — not because the water is poor.

May I reuse the data?

The assignment table postcode ↔ supply zone is based on OpenStreetMap data and is openly available under the Open Database License, including as a download via the API; attribution: “© maunawai.info / © OpenStreetMap contributors”. The analysis results themselves are facts from the suppliers' publications — when using them, please also name the supplier, the issue date of the report and the retrieval date, and refer to the original document. Free access to the processed database via the API is granted on request.

I have found an incorrect value — what now?

Please write to kontakt@maunawai.info, ideally with a link to the page and to the original document. We check every report against the source and correct it promptly. This expressly applies to water suppliers whose data is presented here incompletely or assigned incorrectly. Measured values are never overwritten here: a correction creates a new version, and the archived original document is retained.