How this site makes its calls
A comparison site is only useful if you can see how it reaches its conclusions. This page documents the quiz logic word for word, explains how the provider grid is scored, and states plainly where sponsorship fits in.
1. How quiz answers map to system types
The quiz asks four things: your main complaint, your water source, your household size, and your town. The recommendation is a system type, not a product or a price, and it follows fixed rules. The same answers always produce the same result. Here is the complete rule set:
| Your answers | Recommended system type | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Spots and scale, any source | Water softener | Spots and scale are hardness minerals. Ion exchange is the only system type that removes them. On a well, we add a note to test for iron first. |
| Taste or odor, city water, 1-2 people | RO drinking water | For a small household focused on the kitchen tap, point-of-use RO is usually the most cost-effective fix. |
| Taste or odor, city water, 3-4 or 5+ people | Carbon filtration | Chlorine taste and odor come from municipal disinfectants. Whole-home carbon treats every tap for a busier household. |
| Taste or odor, private well | Well package | Odor on well water usually traces to sulfur, metals, or bacteria, not chlorine. Honest treatment starts with a test. |
| Iron stains, any source | Iron filter | Visible staining means more iron than a softener should carry. On city water, we add a note that aging pipes can be the source, so test first. |
| Well water safety, private well | Well package | Nobody monitors a private well but its owner. A package starts with a full test and adds only the stages the results justify. |
| Well water safety, city water | RO drinking water | Municipal water is tested at the plant but travels miles of pipe. RO adds a final barrier at the tap you drink from. |
Household size never changes the physics; it only breaks the tie between whole-home and point-of-use approaches for taste complaints, and it helps a provider size equipment. Your town does not change the recommendation at all. It is used to check local coverage and to prefill the quote form, nothing else.
The quiz is a starting point, not a diagnosis. The ground truth for any home is a water test, which is why every result on this site points you toward one before you spend money.
2. How the provider grid is assessed
The comparison grid scores providers on five criteria we believe matter most for a St. Louis homeowner: local ownership, free testing, transparent pricing, response time, and coverage. Two kinds of entries appear in the grid, and the distinction is the whole point:
- Green check: an attribute we verified directly with the provider for the St. Louis region, stated in their own published materials or confirmed with their team.
- Gray entry: the honest answer varies. Culligan, Kinetico, EcoWater, RainSoft, and Hague all sell through dealer networks, and dealers differ in ownership, pricing practice, and service speed from one territory to the next. Big-box DIY equipment is a self-install path with its own tradeoffs. In every one of these cases we write what is structurally true ("varies by dealer," "national network," "shelf pricing") rather than guessing a score.
A gray entry is not a criticism. Many dealer-network providers do excellent work, and a national footprint is genuinely useful if you move. We simply refuse to award or deduct points for things we have not verified locally. We do not publish review scores we did not collect, response-time figures we did not measure, or prices we were not quoted.
3. Editorial judgment and sponsorship
The choice of criteria, the wording of every entry, and the quiz logic above are editorial judgments made by this site. Someone else could pick different criteria and build a different grid; this is ours, and we keep it consistent across every provider in the table.
Jones Air & Water is this site's featured provider and holds a sponsored placement, which is disclosed in the footer of every page. That relationship determines which provider we feature for quote requests. It does not change the system type the quiz recommends: the mapping rules in section 1 run entirely on your answers and never look at who the sponsor is.
Our standing advice, whoever you call: get the water test first, get the price in writing before any work, and be wary of any company that recommends equipment before testing your water. A reputable provider will welcome all three.