The hard sell on home water purification systems

This seems like the new Amway. A neighour's sister is getting into this as a business prop and is 'learning the ropes'. So were asked and agreed for her to do her shtick for us, for practice. A couple of neighbours and her sister also said they'd agree to a demo.

Toronto water is notorious for it's hardness, we all know this. We ourselves don't drink or use tap water directly for cooking, it all gets filtered first and that gets rid of the chlorine, the scale and the hardness. This business is local but I guess they have a couple of offices elsewhere. What they sell is a reverse osmosis (RO) system for drinking water and a water softener for the rest of the house. The RO system tucks under the counter with a small pressurized tank to hold the purified water and the RO filter system itself. If you want the 'whole house' system, add on the water softener that goes in the basement.

Anyway, the promo material has lots of skull and crossbone images, pics of people in full has protecting outfits. The word 'carcenogenic' shows up a lot. The speel does drops of chemicals into water to show chlorine content. This was her first failure with our filtered water. Most people neglect to change their water filters and after a couple of months they're useless. But we do ours. So the chlorine test on our tap water, of course, showed up an expected level. Their filtered water showed none. The test for our Brita filtered water barely registered and the fridge filter water showed nil. I'm sure she'd usually get a hit on the brita water, just not ours (we had actually replaced both filters within the last week).

So the next demo, she takes a peculiar electrode apparatus designed to fit in two glasses. In each glass a pair of electrodes are emersed and she plugs the thing into the wall and turns it on. In her water sample, it does nothing, while in the tap water it starts bubbling away, as expected. What's peculiar though, a red film is forming on the top of the water and gets darker and thicker the longer she leaves it in. Then she mutters away that this is a simple test using 'safe' metals in the electrodes of aluminum and iron. Now, iron in electrolysis, not only with the electron transfer cause oxidation of the iron, but also splits water into oxygen and h+ ions and increases the level of oxidation of the iron, thus all the red floatsum. The device also hid the iron inside an aluminum shield with little holes in it so you couldn't see the iron itself and what was happening to it. At the end of that demo, you have a glass full of reddish sludgy water, which she claims is drinkable because it's tap water. Well, it's not quite.

Next she does something else with a couple of test tubes that didn't make much sense except one gets cloudy and fuzzy and the other stays clear except for a small amount of crystaline material said the be nothing more than the added chemicals themselves.

The final demo, two beakers of water, one her sample of purified water and the other is tap water, adding detergent and showing how much more detergent it takes to create bubbles in the tap water and thus demoing the cost savings you'll have. Except that her sample water is the reverse osmosis water, which you'll only see from your kitchen tap fitted with the RO filter. The rest of the house lives with what the water softener supplies.

Then comes the hard sell. The simple RO system under the counter for drinking water only sells normally for 6 thousand dollars, but buy right there and you get it for 3000. They install it, it's guaranteed for 15 years and they'll service it each year but you have to buy the replacment filters, which run 100 bucks for the carbon filters and 199 for the membrane and sediment filters (replaced 1.5-3 years). The whole house system sells for something like 8 or 9 thousand, buy today for 6 thousand. So you get the 'if the issue is money, what will it take for you to buy today?' stuff and it's just different plans stretching out for many years in smaller payments but ends up being way more than just the lump sum prices. Naturally, we declined and I just said that since the brita cleared the water nicely I see no reason to go beyond that.

Since she's a friend of a neighbour I didn't want to burst her bubble too much and she seemed rather excited about the product and is hoping she can make a few dollars off it. But I quickly sent a link of info to her sister's hubby with info about it in case he even considers buying in for whatever reason. The demo was pretty hokey, between the toxic-waste style written material and the very questionable demos with pseudo-scientific explanations for what's going on.

For those who may be approached, read this. If you ever do consider a water filter system for home, RO systems (like ones from GTAWater can be had for a few hundred bucks with filter costs of about 65 bucks a year. Water softeners are iffy and have associated problems so be leery of the 'whole home' systems. To make proper use, you would really want to keep the water softener water away from the drinking water, and this means having some plumbing work done to separate the lines. Plus softener systems require salt replacment and may pose health risks to people with high blood pressure or heart conditions.