What's wrong with your water?

Water announces its problems in a handful of ways: a taste, a smell, a stain, a film on glassware, scale on a fixture. Each of those symptoms maps to a short list of causes, and each cause maps to a class of equipment built for its mechanism. That mapping is what this tool walks — your observation in, the plausible system class out.

What a symptom cannot do is measure. Soap that won't lather suggests hardness but doesn't say how many grains per gallon; a chlorine taste says disinfectant is present but not how much survives to your tap. Two houses with the same complaint can need different equipment sizes — and occasionally different equipment entirely — because the numbers underneath differ.

So treat the result as a well-informed starting point, not a diagnosis. The free in-home screen turns the symptom into numbers — hardness, chlorine, total dissolved solids, read on the spot — and the numbers pick the system. If your water turns out fine, that is a legitimate result too, and we say it plainly.