Water Treatment News

Chlorine effectively destroys bacteria and algae and fluoride is good for your teeth, but while chlorine alone is relatively harmless, it reacts with minerals and chemicals in your water to create cancer causing agents. And ingesting fluoride is simply ridiculous. Why would anyone want to drink a poison? Why are these chemicals added to our water anyway?

Well, the chlorine is there for good reason and because it’s easy to remove just before you ingest it, chlorine for killing bacteria and fungus is a good idea. But I cannot come up with a good reason for fluoride in our water at all. Fortunately, for whatever reasons it’s added to your water, both can be removed with reverse osmosis. Actually, chlorine can be neutralize with a simple carbon filter, but fluoride requires at least reverse osmosis.

You can test for chlorine levels in your water with a simple water test kit. You can neutralize the chlorine completely with a whole-house carbon filtration system available here.

Well, not funny really, just a bit odd.

The amount of orders we projected for last week turned out to be lower than the actual orders that came in. What makes this suprising was the fact that we had very little phone support for the entire week. There were no orders placed over the phone at all, they all came directly from the web site which leads me to believe that perhaps we can do without that highest of all overhead expense, the telephone.

Naw, we’ll keep it going. Most of our competitors have a toll-free phone number posted, but they don’t seem to answer it. How do I know? Because I call them constantly and I have yet to reach anything other than a recording. There is one exception but he does his  business over a cell phone and I can’t stand those things. At least he does answer though.

We answer ours anytime a call comes in and I or Jared are not on the phone with people asking questions. But I have heard from people who have called us and were not able to get a human to answer. Instead of leaving a message, they try back later. Because I can personally attest to being on the phone more than 90% of the time, I would imagine it to get frustrating for someone determined to hear a human voice. They would need to call several times to reach us at just the right moment, but it does happen.

I know it seems like I go on and on about the telephone here but it is our largest overhead expense and if that expense could somehow be removed, our costs would be lower which would save our customers money. On the other hand, I do realize the need for telephone support, but perhaps we could somehow reduce the amount of time each phone call lasts. Right now we are around 30 minutes per call and that seems excessive, but most of the questions being asked are legitimate. However, the answers to almost 100% of those questions can be found on the web site.

On another subject, we are pretty excited about the new Tomlinson designer faucets we started carrying. They have been selling in higher quantities than predicted and the two test faucets we were given have survived the abuse we subjected them to, plus they look good! Check them out on the web site under the reverse osmosis parts section.

Have a Happy New Year!

Any job can get monotonous and this one is no exception, but today it was kind of fun because I went and did something different. I started looking hard at the prices on our products and comparing them with competitors, I started finding some interesting stuff. For instance, did you know that you can get a water purification system from us for less than $400? And that’s our most expensive one. So when I compared that price to the cost of receiving bottled water deliveries I found that you can only get less than a years worth for $400. In other words, why would anyone NOT want to produce their own better-than-bottled-water right in their own home?

So then I started looking around at other stuff that costs $400. You can only get 8 months of high speed Internet service, 9 months of cell phone, one snowboard, a fancy TV stand and some other stuff like an office chair. I actually posted these items on the web site.

It gets people to thinking. We do not seem to be bothered by the comparably high costs of monthly services and common items like office chairs, but we fail to see the value in something that costs so little and does so much like the reverse osmosis system I’m talking about. And that’s just the RO. We sell a lot of equipment and devices for very fair costs, but it doesn’t appear that the cable TV or cell phone services can approach this class of value, yet we seem to take it in stride.

So I’m starting to post these cost comparisons on the respecitve product pages of our web site. I’m curious to see how people are going to react to it.