Methodology Water Quality
Our Services
Where The Figures Come From
Consumer Confidence Reports, published every year by each utility because federal law requires it.
Utility websites and treatment plant documentation where the report doesn’t cover something, like where a source is or how the water gets treated.
We name the report and the year beside any figure we quote, so you can go and check it. Charlotte County’s is PWS #5084100 and it’s on the county utilities site.
We don’t publish our own sampling data. We test water in homes every day, but a pile of readings from customer visits isn’t a representative sample of a county and we’re not going to dress it up as one.
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What We Use
Published Consumer Confidence Reports and utility documentation, attributed.
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What We Don't
Our own field readings. Not a representative sample, so not presented as data.
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The Gap
Hardness is unregulated, so no CCR reports it. Nobody's does.
The Biggest Limitation, Stated Plainly
A Consumer Confidence Report only covers contaminants the EPA regulates.
Hardness isn’t one. Neither is iron in most cases, nor pH. So the numbers that actually decide whether a house needs a softener aren’t in any report your utility publishes, anywhere in the country.
That isn’t a criticism of the utilities. They report what they’re required to report and they report it accurately.
It does mean that anybody quoting you a hardness figure for your town is either testing for it themselves or making it up. Worth asking which.
A report also tells you what left the treatment plant. It can’t tell you what arrives at your tap after crossing town and running through your own plumbing.
- Every figure names its source and its year
- We publish no sampling data of our own
- No CCR anywhere reports hardness
Frequently Asked Questions About Methodology
Why don't you publish your own test results?
Because they'd be a sample of our customers, not a sample of the county. People call us when something's wrong, so our readings skew toward the worst water in any given town. Publishing that as if it represented the area would be misleading, even though every individual number is real.
How often do these pages change?
When the reports do, which is roughly once a year. Utilities publish Consumer Confidence Reports in the middle of the year covering the previous one. If a figure here has a year attached, that's the year it came from.
Can I check any of this?
That's the point of naming the sources. Every report we've quoted is public and linked, and the Charlotte County one carries its system number so you can be sure you've got the right document. If something here doesn't match what you read, we'd rather hear about it than not.
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