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The background the tools and symptom pages lean on, written out properly.
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Why these four
These are the pages the rest of the site leans on. Every tool and every symptom page eventually routes back to one of them, because the same four questions sit underneath almost every well water decision.
Treatment order is the site’s central argument, and the thing most often got wrong. Equipment installed out of sequence can fail completely while appearing to be the right equipment — an iron filter in acidic water, UV on cloudy water, a softener ahead of iron removal.
Testing is the step that makes everything else possible. On a private well nobody is testing on your behalf, and the three contaminants that matter most for health cannot be tasted, smelled or seen.
Shock chlorination is the first response to a bacteria result and doubles as a diagnostic — how fast a problem returns after shocking tells you whether it was biological or chemical.
Hardness is the most misunderstood number on a water report, mostly because it is reported in two units that produce very different-looking figures for the same water.
If you're new to a well
The shortest useful path: get a test for coliform bacteria and nitrate, which many county health departments do free or cheaply, plus hardness, iron and pH, which you can measure adequately at home. Those five numbers determine almost everything you will be asked to decide.
Then read the results before shopping. Water treatment is a field where the people offering to interpret your test also sell the equipment, and a test from an independent lab is cheap insurance against a system you did not need.