There’s a very simple way to answer this question: Have your water tested by an independent third party lab. Some Raleigh area companies will come to your home with a water testing kit and many scary words, with the intentions of selling you a Water Filtration System for $10,000 that you probably don’t need–and if they’re convincing enough, you’ll buy it from them anyway. These types of companies will also probably try to sell you the same exact system they sold to a homeowner in a different city; does that mean your water and their water is the same? Of course not!
In reality, your water is significantly different from your next door neighbor’s water, not to mention the water from a neighboring city! Municipal water is generally good, and in this case, you might choose to have a system installed to simply remove the disinfectants commonly used to treat water (e.g. chlorine, chloramine or ammonia). As for private or community water, this is a different story: There’s a 20% chance that your water has volatile organic compounds in it!
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that VOCs are present in one-fifth of the nation’s water supplies. Relax, it just sounds scary. VOCs can enter drinking water supplies from a variety of sources. Benzene, for example, may enter ground-water from gasoline or oil spills on the ground surface, or from leaking underground fuel tanks. Other examples of commonly detected VOCs are dichloromethane (methylene chloride), an industrial solvent; trichloroethylene, used in septic system cleaners, and tetrachloroethylene (perchloroethylene), used in the dry-cleaning industry. This won’t be a problem, however, if you have your water tested by an independent third party lab.
Other local companies will try to sell you a water softener and a reverse-osmosis system to “solve” this issue, but not only is this not a viable solution, it could also endanger your health and waste a lot of water! A water softener uses salt (which you have to add into your water every month), causing a big problem if you have high blood pressure, and a reverse-osmosis system wastes 25 gallons of water every 3-5 days by recharging.
At Raleigh Plumbing, we have a better idea: GET YOUR WATER TESTED BY A THIRD PARTY INDEPENDENT LAB! Once we receive the results from you, we’ll get to work consulting with some of the top people in the industry to find the best solution for your water issue.
-Bobby P. from Raleigh Plumbing.
