Public water system testing in Fredericksburg, VA may not be something you spend a lot of time thinking about. After all, if you live in town and are on “city water,” they’ve got people for that, right? And those people make sure you’ve got good water.
Well, yes and no, which is why public water system testing in Fredericksburg, VA is much more important than most people realize.
First and foremost, yes. The city does have people for that, and those people are responsible for making sure that the water coming out of your tap is safe to drink. That is to say, their job is to make sure it won’t kill you. Anything beyond that is a bonus, and even then, some municipalities don’t do a great job at ensuring the safety of the town water supply. Ask anyone who lives in Flint, Michigan, for example.
It’s actually not fair to pick on Flint and single them out, because although they made national headlines, according to the EPA, there are more than a thousand communities scattered all across the nation with water problems that are as bad, if not worse than Flint’s problems.
All that to say, it’s probably not a good idea to just accept at face value that the people handling the municipal water supply you’re using are doing a great job. They might be. Everyone hopes they are, but when it comes to your family’s health and safety, do you want blind hope, or facts and data?
Most people will choose facts and data, and if that’s where you are, then our recommendation is to have the water coming out of your tap tested at least every 12 months. That gives you a series of snapshots in time that allows you to track changes to the water you’re drinking across time and compare the current year with prior years to see what has changed.
We run one of the best known and most well-respected private testing labs in the region, and we offer a wide range of tests, so before you give us a call, it pays to spend some time thinking about exactly what you’re most interested in testing for. Broadly speaking, the tests we offer can be broken into two major groups – water quality tests and health and safety tests. Below, we’ll talk more about both:
Water Quality Tests
Not all water is the same. If you’ve moved around a lot, you’ve almost certainly experienced this firsthand. Some places have ‘good water.’ It’s crisp, clean, and has no funny aftertaste.
Sometimes though, the water’s not so great. Sure, it might not kill you but that doesn’t mean you enjoy drinking it, which is why a great deal of the public water system testing we do in Fredericksburg, VA is centered around quality issues.
The good news is that there aren’t really all that many different things that impact water quality, and we test for all the major elements. After all, you can’t fix a problem unless you know what’s causing it, and there’s absolutely no reason you should just resign yourself to drinking water you don’t like the taste of.
Here are the various things we can test for on the water quality front:
Iron – If your sinks, toilet and tub are stained with a reddish-brown discoloration, the likeliest culprit is a high concentration of iron in your water. This test will confirm that to be the root cause of the issue.
Manganese – Like iron, a high concentration of manganese in the water coming into your home will stain your sinks, toilets and tub, along with any clothing you wash.
Sulfates – Does your water smell like rotten eggs? Sulfates are the likely culprit. This test will confirm that, and tell you how big a problem you’ve got.
pH – Not only does a very high or very low pH level impact the taste of the water you’re drinking, high pH levels can corrode the pipes in your home, which can cause a variety of dangerous metals to leach into the water your family relies on. This is an incredibly important test!
Hardness – You’ve almost certainly heard at least some people talk about how ‘hard’ their water is. The reason it’s a problem is that it causes an unsightly scaly residue to build up in your shower, tub, and sinks and hard water prevents soaps from lathering up properly.
And Total Dissolved Solids – A small amount of minerals in your water can actually be a good thing, but there is such a thing as too much of a good thing, and minerals in high concentration can dramatically alter the taste of the water you’re drinking, and usually not in a good way. This test will tell you what minerals are present, and in what concentrations.