My name is Chriss R. I’m 51, and I’ve been a general building contractor since I was 22. For most of those years the water running through the houses I worked on was somebody else’s department — until it wasn’t. Scale that quietly shortens the life of a four-year-old water heater. A well that runs clear in spring and orange by autumn. A softener sized from a guess, regenerating twice as often as it should, charging a family for salt it never needed. WaterTreatGuide is where I write down the arithmetic I wish those homeowners had seen before they signed anything.
The engineer who ended up in the basement
I trained as an engineer — Industrial Engineering & Maintenance — and expected to spend my career on factory floors, planning maintenance intervals. My father had been a building contractor his whole working life, and when he started talking about slowing down I joined him on his sites and eventually took over the company. The degree turned out to be the useful half of the education: a house is a maintenance schedule with a roof on it, and water treatment is the part of it that quietly decides how long everything else lasts.
These days I run the business from a desk — estimates, specifications, bids, project follow-up — which my knees appreciate, and which leaves time to write down in one place what I used to explain one kitchen table at a time. I have four boys, so I get regular practice explaining things to people who did not ask.
What I know, and what I’m not
Precision matters on the internet, so let me be exact. I am not a licensed plumber, and I have never presented myself as one. On my projects the licensed trades did the installing. My job was everything around them: reading the water report, deciding what the house actually needed, pricing the options, sequencing the work, and being the one who answered for the result afterwards.
That is a specific vantage point, and it teaches things a product page never will — which line items on a quote are real, which upgrade never earns its money back, and what the equipment looks like eight years in, because I was usually still working with the same clients when it got there. Softener loops, well pumps and pressure tanks, sediment and carbon stages, under-sink reverse osmosis, and the septic field downstream that everyone forgets is connected to all of it.
What I am not is a laboratory. I don’t run water chemistry. Where this site talks about what is in your water, it sends you to your utility’s annual report or to a certified lab test — not to the free in-home test offered by the company that would like to sell you the cure.
Why WaterTreatGuide exists
A failing water heater announces itself with a cold shower. Bad water doesn’t. It shows up as a symptom — scale on the faucets, a rotten-egg smell, rust stains in the sink, laundry that comes out grey — and a symptom can have three or four different causes, each with a different fix at a different price. That gap between symptom and cause is where the money gets lost, and it is exactly the gap the industry sells into.
So this site does three things, on every guide: it gives the installed cost rather than the box price, it shows the sizing math so you can rerun it against your own water report, and it puts a number on ten years of running costs — salt, filters, membranes, electricity, wasted water. If a $600 system does the job your $3,000 quote was written for, the article says so. How all of that is sourced, dated and corrected is public in our Editorial Policy.
What you won’t find here
- Installation or repair walkthroughs. Water treatment work touches potable plumbing, pressurised vessels, electrical circuits and, on septic properties, the drain field. Everything here is informational — hire a licensed professional, and check your local code, which varies more than anyone expects.
- Services for sale. I don’t install anything through this site, and I won’t hand you to someone who paid to be recommended.
- Sponsored rankings. No manufacturer, dealer or installer buys a verdict here.
- Referral fees. None from installers, none from manufacturers.
The site does carry display advertising — that is what keeps it running. Those ads are sold independently of the editorial work: an advertiser can buy space beside an article, never a conclusion inside one.
The paperwork
WaterTreatGuide is published by NET STUDIO LLC, 1501 South Greeley Hwy, Ste C #1386, Cheyenne, WY 82007, United States. Behind the company name, it’s me at the desk. Full publisher and hosting details are on the Legal Notice page.
If you’ve found an error, disagree with one of my numbers, or want to tell me that your softener outlived my cost model, I’d genuinely like to hear it. The contact page is the fastest route, or write to 
.
— Chriss R., editor