The things people ask us at the kitchen table

Yes, it is free, and there is nothing attached to it. We come to your house, draw water at the kitchen sink, and run the tests at your table while you watch. It takes about twenty minutes.

You get the numbers either way. If the honest answer is that your water is in reasonable shape and you do not need much, that is what you will hear from us before we leave.

Most installations are finished in a morning. We turn the water off at the main, plumb the system in near where the line comes into the house, set it to the hardness we measured, run it through a cycle while you watch, put the water back on and clean up after ourselves. You have soft water the same day.

No. A Kinetico system runs on the energy of the water moving through it. There is no cord, no timer to reset and no circuit board to fail later. When the power goes out in February, the water in your house carries on exactly as it was.

A single tank has to stop working in order to clean itself, which is why so many of them regenerate in the middle of the night and hold a reserve to cover the rest of the day. Two tanks take turns. One supplies the house while the other cleans, so the house is never handed anything but treated water.

The second benefit is that the cleaning tank rinses with water the other tank has already softened, which uses less salt and is easier on the resin.

That depends on how hard your water is and how much of it your household uses, and anybody who quotes you a number before testing your water is guessing.

What we can tell you is how the system decides. It meters the gallons that actually pass through and regenerates when the capacity has been used, not on a fixed night of the week. A quiet week costs you less salt. A week with company costs a little more.

No. What ends up in the water is a small amount of sodium, in proportion to how hard the water was to start with, and most people never detect it.

If sodium is something you are keeping an eye on for any reason at all, say so during the test. We can look at potassium chloride instead of salt, or leave the kitchen cold tap on untreated water, or pair the softener with a K5 drinking water station. There is more than one way to arrange it.

They solve different problems, so most of our customers end up with both. The softener protects everything the whole house uses: the water heater, the laundry, the dishwasher, the shower. The K5 drinking water station treats the few gallons a day you actually drink and cook with.

You do not have to do both at once. Plenty of people start with the softener and add the K5 a year later.

It usually is. Wells bring iron, sulfur odor and sediment along with hardness, and the order in which you treat those matters a great deal. Taking iron out ahead of the softener means the softener has an easier life.

It is also why we will not quote a well without seeing it. Read more on water problems, or just call and describe what you are noticing.

A great many Central Ohio houses are on a slab, and a twin tank system has a fairly small footprint. We have put them in garages, utility closets, laundry rooms and under stairs.

We will look at the space during the test visit and tell you honestly if it is going to be awkward. Better to find that out at the kitchen table than on installation morning.

You add salt when it wants salt, and you glance at the tank when you happen to be down there. That is your side of it.

Our side is an annual visit. We check the settings, look the system over, change what needs changing and answer whatever has come up since last year. There is no app to keep updated and no cartridge schedule for you to remember.

Usually not, and on purpose. Most installations leave the outdoor hose bibs on untreated water, because the lawn and the garden do not care and there is no sense treating water that is going on the grass.

If you want an outside tap on treated water for washing the car, tell us during the test and we will plumb it that way.

Look at the shower door two days after you last cleaned it, look at the base of the kitchen faucet, and feel a towel straight out of the dryer. Those three things will tell you most of it.

Then have it measured, because guessing at the number is how people end up with the wrong size system. Central Ohio sits on a lot of limestone, so hard water here is ordinary rather than unusual.