Water Treatment News

We have some new equipment and software at Water Value now and it appears to be speeding things up quite a bit. That and the addition of another order entry specialist. Things are now going smooth and we’re able to keep up with the phone calls. Speaking of phone calls, here I go again.

We are not the manufacturer of the fine products that we sell. Also, nobody here is going to recommend one of our 3 brands over the others. If we felt one brand was better than the other, we would only sell that brand. Keep in mind that we thoroughly test everything we sell on the web site. If we did not, we would not be able to answer your questions properly. Simply attending a factory sponsored demonstration does not cut it. We purchase from the factory, hook the equipment up, test it, evaluate it, abuse it and even rip it apart just to make sure that what you the consumer, are buying is going to work as advertised for you right out of the box.

We are in this business for the long-haul and we have no intentions of selling water treatment equipment that is sub-standard.

We have new water testing kits in. They are improved over the previous ones by price, value and features. There are two types of specialty kits. One is for testing well water and the other is for testing city water. It doesn’t get much simpler than that. Each of these kits can test for several contaminants twice making them of greater value than the other testing kits we offered. Also, they are priced several dollars less.

There is also a “Complete” testing kit that should be available tomorrow or Saturday that is capable of dual testing for every kind of element or water contaminant you can imagine, and then some. It also contains a bacteria testing kit but only one test for that. I’m not sure yet on the cost for this complete kit, but it should be less than the other complete testing kit we offered before.

Visit our water test kit page and let us know what you think.

It is time to do away with the Water Weekly feature article we’ve been maintaining at WaterValue.com for the past 4 years. It has nothing to do with lack of popularity or interest. As a matter of fact, it’s one of our top ten visited pages every day, but it is no longer functioning the way it was intended.

Water Weekly started out as a way of answering the most often asked questions that we would get over the phone in an effort to cut down on the time we spend on the phone. After we started selling water treatment equipment online in 2002, it became obvious that we were answering the same questions over the phone all day, every day. I remember initially coming up with answers to frequently asked questions and posting them in the FAQ area. That page soon started to become too big for people to scroll through and look for their answers, so Water Weekly was started. Each week we would deal in depth with the most often asked questions from the previous week. Then each of these weekly articles would be archived so that users could look for the article that dealt with their particular question(s). Unfortunately, the archive page is getting way too large so another solution must be found.

Our first thought was to change the Water Weekly Archives page to a search-able index and work was started on that last month, but it dawned on me that we already have the database and software available for a search-able index. A search-able database for text is included with our web log software which is now installed on our server. Why not simply deal with the weekly questions on the blog? After all, we pretty much have been doing just that all along.

So our Water Value Daily News blog will double as answers to all of the popular questions, and when these answers pertain to certain products we have on the web site, we can even provide a direct link to those answers from that product’s information page. So Water Weekly is no more, but we will still be providing answers to your water treatment questions, it just won’t be in a weekly article anymore, it will most likely be daily.

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.

Okay, I think I understand now. I’ve been exposed to the type of water treatment equipment we’ve been selling for over five years now and I’ve known nothing else until recently. Now I think I understand why people are haggling over a few bucks here and there and the reasons are two fold.

First, there is a great deal of hype out on the Internet in general. Go look at eBay for one. Most of the sellers there with eBay Stores have spent a great deal of time and effort writing copy to use over and over and over again to sell their products. When I look at the two water treatment equipment people there, I notice that their descriptions or copy for different items is for the most part the same for each product they sell. They also hype up the description as well. Because the copy reads like a used car salesman running an auction, I can see where customers would get the impression that this equipment can be haggled over just like a used car.

Secondly, there is the junk out there for comparison. Now, I can’t and won’t mention any brand names, but I was working on a system for a friend of mine this weekend. The equipment was purchased before I got into the business so it was of a brand that Water Value will never carry. Anyway, it needed some cleaning and I thought that would take care of the problem but I was wrong. Once we tried to initiate a regeneration cycle, the problem was obvious. The control valve was not only broken but non-repairable. What I mean by non-repairable is that it would cost more to buy and replace the parts than it would to throw it away and get a new one. And on top of all that, the replacement parts were unavailable. The company this softener was manufactured by would not sell them to me because I was not trained on their product. Of that, I’m proud. This control valve was the sorriest excuse for an automatic valve I’ve ever imagined. Like I said, I will not mention the company but they are huge.

My point is, the equipment we train on, sell and support is obviously designed to last much longer than the controller I was exposed to this weekend. Check out our weekly article at Water Weekly.