Why I know anything about water
Because I have spent two decades taking apart machines that failed because of it. Scaled heat exchangers, seized solenoids, ice machines that die and die again in the same building. I am not a chemist or an engineer. What I have is repetition — somewhere north of four thousand service calls, most of them in the hardest municipal water in the country.
How this started
In 2019 I replaced the same part in the same taqueria in Mesa for the third time in fourteen months. The owner paid, again. It bothered me enough that I tested the incoming water, then went home and tested my own, and mine was worse.
Then I tried to find out what fixing it would cost and could not. Every page I opened was run by somebody selling a system or a subscription. Nobody would tell me the running cost. So I started a spreadsheet, and I have kept it since — filter change dates, membrane prices, meter readings, what each thing actually cost me over a year rather than what the box said.
Why a site this size, from someone this ordinary
Fair question, so here is the honest answer: nothing on this site required intelligence. Every water utility in America publishes an annual quality report. They are free, public and staggeringly boring. The reason nobody has put them in order is not that it is hard — it is that nobody wants to open four hundred PDFs.
The rest is my job doing the work for me. I am inside three to six buildings a week with a water problem, and I have been for twenty-one years. No researcher could fund that; I accumulated it by turning up to work. Repair is also a lot of waiting — for parts, for someone with keys — and that waiting is where most of this got written, twenty minutes at a time since 2019.
So it is not remarkable per year. It only looks like something in aggregate, which is what keeping records does.
What I am not good at
Money, in ordinary ways. I bought a truck in 2016 I could not afford and spent three years regretting it. I have never once negotiated a raise. I am a slow writer and I rewrite everything four or five times. The spreadsheet behind the calculator on the front page was mine for years before somebody who actually knows how turned it into a web page.
How this is paid for
Some links here are affiliate links: if you buy through one, this site earns a commission at no extra cost to you. That is the whole business model, and there are two rules I hold myself to because of it.
- Where the honest answer is that you need nothing, the page says so. Most households on decent municipal water do not need a $450 system, and telling you that costs me money. It is also the reason to believe the rest.
- Every figure carries the date it was checked and where it came from. If one is wrong, it is wrong in a way you can catch, and I would rather you caught it.