I priced these systems for 15 years. Now I publish the numbers.
Robert Miller
For more than fifteen years I was the person turning a walkthrough of a garage, a plumbing layout, and a water complaint into the number on the quote — not the one soldering the pipe, the one deciding what the pipe, the labour, the permit and the tank should cost, and defending that number when a homeowner asked. This site is that estimating worksheet, opened for the homeowner instead of against them.
Counted from the live site at build time, July 2026 — not marketing round numbers.
What I am — and what I’m not
An about page you can trust should be precise about its author’s limits, so: I am a former estimator. I am not a licensed plumber, a chemist, or a laboratory — when this site needs installation code facts it cites code sources, when it needs water chemistry it cites USGS, WQA, EPA and manufacturer documentation, and when it needs a price it links the published listing with the date we saw it. I do not review products I “personally tested for six months,” because I did not, and you have no way to check either claim. You can check a source link. So that is what we build with.
Six rules behind every figure — all verifiable
Sourced and dated
Every meaningful figure links its source, and 49 pages carry a data-updated stamp — because prices float, and a number without a date is a rumour.
Ranges over false precision
“$840–$4,120 depending on…” — never “the average is $2,436.” Averages hide the line items that decide your quote.
Conflicts reconciled in the open
When two published figures disagree, both get printed with the reason — usually different scopes — never silently averaged.
Calculated means labelled
Arithmetic on sourced parts is honest work; presenting it as measurement is not. Every derived figure says so.
Sellers’ numbers, sellers’ labels
Our Florida study caught one city’s hardness quoted at 7.5, 10–15, and 17.2 gpg by three publishers — climbing exactly with the publisher’s incentive. We route you to your utility’s free report instead.
No email gates, ever
All forty-five calculators run on the page, free — and several will tell you to buy nothing.
The calculator we refuse to build
The clearest window into a site’s editorial spine is what it declines to publish. The most-requested tool in this niche is an “appliance damage calculator” — type your hardness, watch hard water “cost you” thousands. We publicly decline to build it, because the underlying figures trace to industry-funded, accelerated-protocol research we will only cite with that label attached. The same spine runs through the tools we did build: the RO builder refuses to sell a softener below the published 7 gpg threshold, the 50-state study refuses to invent per-state price averages, the combo router has a “buy nothing” verdict, and the Florida tool refuses to size equipment for well water without a lab test. A tool that cannot say “don’t buy” is an ad with sliders.
How a page gets made here
Because “we have high standards” is what everyone says, here is the machinery instead — every page passes this before it publishes:
None of this makes us right. It makes us checkable — which is the property the water-treatment industry’s pricing has historically lacked, and the one this site was built to supply.
How we make money — the plain version
Some links on this site are affiliate links, marked with rel="sponsored" exactly as search engines require and explained in full in our affiliate disclosure. If you buy through one — most point to SpringWell, a manufacturer that publishes its prices online, which is the single behaviour this site exists to reward — we may earn a commission at no cost to you. Three commitments keep that honest: we never print a SpringWell dollar price (so a promotion can’t silently date our pages); the recommendation logic runs on your water, not our commission — which is why our own tools regularly conclude “RO alone,” “the cheap one is fine,” or “buy nothing”; and every cost page works with the affiliate links removed. If a page ever fails that test, it’s a bug — report it.
Corrections
Published prices float — we’ve caught the same SKU at two prices on the same retailer’s page weeks apart, and we print observed floats as ranges with dates. Found a stale figure, a moved source, or wrong arithmetic? Send the page URL; corrections ship in the next build. Being correctable in public is cheaper than being wrong in private.
Contact
Robert Miller
SoftWaterSystemCost
2650 W Belleview Ave 1st Floor
Littleton, CO 80123
The contact page has a form and the email address. This site does not sell equipment, install, or make in-home sales visits — that’s rather the point.