Twenty-five years of valley water

Glenn Giolito has been treating water in the Phoenix valley since 2000. In that time the valley has roughly doubled in size, the water has stayed just as hard, and the way most of the industry sells against it has not improved much.

There is a particular pattern here that we set ourselves against. A national chain sends a commissioned salesperson to your kitchen, they run a demonstration designed to alarm rather than to measure, and the price falls by half if you sign tonight. The equipment is often fine. The way it is sold is not, and it is why people distrust this whole trade.

We do the opposite, and it is not complicated. We come out, we test your water with a real kit, and we tell you the number. Then we tell you what we would do about it — which is sometimes less than you expected, and occasionally nothing at all. There is no discount that expires when we leave your driveway, because the price is just the price.

The other half of it is sizing. A water softener is specified on grains of hardness per day, which means the people in the house and the water they actually use. Get that wrong and the system regenerates every night, burns salt, and still lets hard water through at seven in the morning when everyone is in the shower. A great deal of the disappointment people have with softeners is really disappointment with a unit that was never large enough. This is why we will not quote over the phone.

We are deliberately small. Glenn is on the jobs. We do not install other national vendors' equipment, and we would rather turn down work that is not right for us than do it badly. If you want a company where the person who sold you the system is the person who installs it and the person who answers when you call two years later, that is the whole idea.