Tools

Free, no signup, nothing emailed to you. Each tool documents its assumptions on the page.

Calculators

What treatment do I need?Start from what you can see, smell and taste. Gives you the stages your symptoms point at, in order, and the exact list to ask a lab to test for.Water test interpreterEnter your lab results and get each one judged against the published EPA limit, plus the treatment train your water calls for, in installation order.Softener sizing calculatorGrain capacity from hardness, iron and household size — including the iron compensation most sizing charts leave out.Salt cost calculatorAnnual salt use and cost for the softener you already own, and a warning if it is regenerating too often or too rarely.Operating cost calculatorWhat the whole treatment train costs to run, year by year — consumables, UV lamps, power draw and the media beds that fall due in a lump.Pressure tank calculatorTank size from pump flow rate and pressure switch setting, sized to give the pump a full run cycle.Shock chlorination calculatorBleach dose from your casing size and water depth, scaled for the strength of the bleach you actually bought.Water hardness by zip codeHow hard the groundwater is in your county, from USGS well samples — with an interactive county map, state rankings and the dataset to download.Well water contamination by zip codeWhat share of USGS-tested wells in your county were over the EPA standard for arsenic, nitrate, manganese, uranium, radon, fluoride and lead — and which tests are worth ordering.Well water testing by stateFind testing near you: your state's certified lab list, free and low-cost testing programs with who qualifies, and when the law requires a test — for all 50 states, from official sources.Well drilling permits by statePermit or notice, fee, licensed driller and owner-drill rules, and how far a well must be from the septic tank and drain field — every state, with the rule text.Water hardness convertermg/L to grains per gallon and back, with the full conversion chart and what each level actually means.Well pump sizing calculatorTotal dynamic head and motor size from your depth, pressure and pipe — capped at what the well can actually sustain.Generator size for a well pumpMinimum generator watts from the pump's horsepower and wiring, using the motor maker's own table — plus everything else that will be running when the pump restarts.Is my well pump bad?Ranks the likely cause against your symptoms, and separates the cheap parts from the expensive one before anybody pulls a pump.

How these differ from a vendor's calculator

Most water treatment calculators are lead capture with arithmetic attached. They ask for an email before showing a result, and the result reliably recommends the product the site sells.

These do not ask for anything and are not attached to a product. Every one of them will tell you that you need nothing, if that is what your numbers say — the softener sizing tool refuses to recommend a softener at all when iron is above 3 mg/L, because at that level a softener is the wrong machine.

The arithmetic is also published rather than hidden. Every constant the tools use — the 17.1 mg/L per grain conversion, the 4 gpg of load per ppm of iron, the drawdown factors, the salt efficiency figure — is listed with its reasoning, so you can check the working or disagree with an assumption.

Every assumption, written down

Which one to start with

If you have a lab report, the water test interpreter — it reads every result at once and tells you which stages your water actually needs, in installation order. Everything else on this list answers a narrower question.

If you have no test yet, start from the symptom instead. The diagnostic pages get you to a likely cause, and that tells you what to ask the lab for.

Diagnose by symptom