In the wake of various water quality crises from Flint, Michigan and Puerto Rico, there is a growing interest and demand among consumers for home water testing. Enter DIY water testing kits like Tap Score by SimpleWater.
Tap Score in particular was conceived of and launched by former UC Berkeley grad student John Pujol and co-founder and CTO Julio Rodriguez.
Pujol had every personal reason to feel compelled to improve water quality, because for him, the problem started at home.
Tap Score allows users to test for more than 100 regulated and emerging contaminants common in US drinking water, including copper, arsenic, and lead. Consumers can order it online, and get it shipped to their homes. It arrives with a kit of materials and instructions, and guides users through filling sample vials at their taps and documenting the time and date of their samples. They ship their samples back in, and 10 business days later (or less), their results are back.
While the final results that reach users are pretty easy to understand, the testing and analysis is still up to rigorous standards.
SimpleWater sends the user’s water quality results to them, along with an analysis of personal health risks, local risk mapping, and recommendations for optimized treatment. Users can follow up on what’s in the report itself with SimpleWater by phone or email if they want to.
DIY testing: what happens next?
Once the user has the results, the next steps aren’t always obvious. For a private well user the burden is on them to remediate any problems, and this can be a costly process. For city users, however, while it may seem like cost to fix problems is out of the consumer’s hands, this isn’t always the case. Users often detect something in the water that they believe is originating from the public water system, but their municipality will tell them that it’s a use point problem.
From there, consumers can take steps to fix the problem, wherever it originates. And if the testing and all of the other information suggests that it’s not a use point issue, the consumer can approach their municipality armed with data.
In some cases, the testing might find contaminants at levels which are legal, but not healthy.
Many consumers are of the mindset that any water that comes out of the tap “has to” be safe, but Pujol says this just isn’t so.
Water testing kits aren’t perfect; occasionally they can miss certain molecules.
Pujol is no herald of doom, but he does think DIY testing is going to be important to maintaining better water quality in the near future.