Mountain View Pure Water Podcast

The Whole House Water Filtration Choice: Entry Point Systems Explained

• Dan Toth • Episode 9

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How Do I Choose Point Of Use Water System Options?

Ever wonder what's lurking in your tap water and how it affects your entire home? The latest Mountain View Pure Podcast tackles the often-overlooked importance of point-of-entry water filtration systems that treat every drop flowing into your house.

Host Dan Toth takes listeners on a revealing journey through water quality challenges that vary dramatically depending on your water source. City water arrives with excessive chemical sanitizers—often 15 times more than necessary—irritating skin during showers and damaging fixtures throughout your home. Well water presents its own complex puzzle, with issues ranging from acidity and sulfur (so potent it can "chase you out of your house") to iron that stains everything it touches and extreme hardness levels that damage appliances and create stubborn soap scum.

What makes this episode particularly valuable is Dan's practical breakdown of the hidden costs of poor water quality. Most homeowners don't realize they're already paying a steep price for untreated water through increased cleaning product expenses, frequent fixture replacements, and shortened appliance lifespans. With concrete examples from across the Tri-Cities region, Dan demonstrates how a whole-house filtration system typically pays for itself within five years, offering what he calls "a 100% return within 60 months"—an investment opportunity you'd be hard-pressed to find anywhere else.

Beyond the compelling financial case, the podcast addresses the significant quality-of-life improvements that come with properly treated water: better-tasting drinks, reduced skin irritation, easier cleaning, and the peace of mind that comes from knowing every faucet, shower, and appliance in your home is receiving healthy, properly filtered water. 

Ready to transform your home's water quality? Call or text 423-218-9361 for a free consultation and discover why great water truly is the foundation of a great life.

To learn more about Mountain View Pure Water & Air visit:
https://www.MVPWater.net
Mountain View Pure Water & Air
2926 Boones Creek Rd Suite #1
Johnson City, TN 37615
423-218-9361

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Mountain View Pure Podcast, where your journey to exceptional water quality begins. Here's your host, dan Toth, owner of Mountain View Pure Water. They proudly serve homeowners in the Tri-Cities and beyond, offering advanced water and air purification solutions that support a healthier lifestyle. The mission is clear helping you get great water.

Speaker 2:

Thinking of purifying all the water flowing into your home. Let's break down the point of entry systems that offer whole home peace of mind. Welcome back everyone. Skip Mon Money, co-host, slash producer, back in the studio with Mr Dan Toth, who is the owner of Mountain View Pure Water.

Speaker 3:

Dan, how's it going? Doing well, Skip. How are you today?

Speaker 2:

Doing fine, doing just fine Always a pleasure. Your deep dive into clean living keeps getting better with every episode. So, speaking of clean living, for those of us who don't have a filtration system in our home, what point of entry options are available when purchasing a water purification system?

Speaker 3:

The first thing we need to know is are you on city water or well water? That makes a big difference. City water comes to us fairly clean and clear. It has a good amount of pressure on it because it has to go to multiple homes, and so the city has certain standards that it has to abide by to sell us that water. So we have a kind of a it varies a little bit, but pretty much a certain type of water that's coming to the house, and then we have well water, which can be completely varied.

Speaker 3:

I found water that was let's see, we'll just talk about our area Down in Flag Pond. I found water that was acidic, around a 5 or 5.5 pH. It had almost nothing dissolved in it, so it was soft water and it had sulfur, and so there's a lot of problems with that water. The acidity of the water would cause it to eat up pipes and plumbing and fixtures, and the amount of sulfur was enough to chase you out of your house when you turn the spigot on, and so certain things have to be done to remove that. It didn't need a softener, but we did need to make sure that it was safe. So water that seems fairly clean can have lots of different issues. Up in the Sir Goinsville area, rogersville area, we can get a lot of iron and sulfur. Up there Down in Mossheim more Greenville area, we can find hard water. Hard water that's 40, 50, 60 grains hard. So these are some different difficulties in well water that you'll run into as a homeowner and besides the water quality you'll have.

Speaker 3:

Wells produce different volume of water. Gallons per minute production is what we think of, and if your well doesn't produce a lot of water, it's. It can be difficult to treat the water because water treatment requires filtration. The filtration equipment requireswashing and self-cleaning, regeneration, and if you don't have the right volume of water to actually clean the system, the system's not going to work as well for you. So there's a lot of different issues that we run into. Well water has typically a lower pressure on it. What water pressure on well water is? Somewhere between I've seen it as low as 30 PSI and as high as probably about 70, whereas city water comes into the house at sometimes over 100 PSI. And so with well water we want to make sure that we boost it to the point where it's usable in the home and it can regenerate. A system for filtration On city water. Exactly the opposite. We want to reduce the flow, the pressure on it, so it does not break things. A lot of your fixtures and appliances have switches that are built to about 55 psi.

Speaker 3:

If you have a high PSI coming in, you can break things. It can cause your washing machine to start running out water when it's not turned on. It can cause your ice machine to break and leak. It can cause your your toilets, the seals and things like that to be ruined as well. So those are just water pressure issues before we even get into filtration. But let's just take well water filtration first.

Speaker 3:

If you have well water that has iron in it or sediment or hardness or sulfur, or even maybe methane nitrates Nitrates are typically found where there's a farm or industrial runoff as fertilizers and organic waste that can seep into wells wells.

Speaker 3:

If you have a lot of nitrates, you want to make sure that the well isn't positioned too closely to an industrial or farm field or your septic, because that water can leach into the well water and make it unsafe to drink. So those are some things. That preliminary testing a water treatment professional stopping out to your house taking a look at things, testing the water and assessing it on site is really necessary before somebody can ever quote you on what kind of water quality or equipment you'll need. Yeah, there's a lot of things that go into this, which is why I'll often have people call me over the phone and they'll ask for quotes, and they'll ask for comparative quotes. And hey, what would you charge me to do this? And I can't possibly give them prices because I don't even know what they need. So we have to go on site and test the water. We have to find out their specific water quality information before we know what to offer them to fix their issues.

Speaker 2:

Do you charge to do an assessment?

Speaker 3:

No, we don't charge to do the assessments. What we do is we try to stay within about an hour's drive of Johnson City and that way we feel pretty confident that we can take care of those customers and service them very well over the lifetime that they need the equipment. But we don't charge for the actual testing that we do. So we come out, we assess the water quality, we assess the plumbing situation, make sure that we can install something in the first place. It's kind of a bummer when you talk to somebody on the phone and you're like hey, I know, I can fix this issue for you, and you get to their house and they don't have a place to put equipment. That's a pretty big issue. You can't filter the water if you don't have a place to install equipment.

Speaker 3:

And so having a proper well house that's large enough to hold equipment, or a place inside the home, a basement, garage or even a maintenance room often it turns into something being installed in the laundry room, people can actually have a better water quality, and these are things that often aren't thought about until I stop out and bring up that question of hey, where would you put this? Hey, where does the water come into your house? People often don't even know where the water comes in.

Speaker 2:

Wow, well, it's interesting not to go back to pressure, but I live pretty close to the pumping station in the Nolichucky River that got wiped out during the flood during Helene, and when they brought a pump back online it blew out every single toilet in my house. I had to replace the mechanism in all of them because they were all leaking and running, and yeah, so, been there, done that, but anyway, interesting. So that is something that you don't think about, because you got me thinking okay, where would I put a filtration system? I would hope I could put it under a cabinet near the sink in the kitchen or somewhere, but probably not.

Speaker 3:

Well, that brings us to the real issue with this episode is the difference between point of entry and point of use. So we're talking about point of entry and that would be mainly the whole house water filtration, house water filtration. So you'd want the main line that comes into the house to be filtered so that every toilet, sink, shower, faucet, dishwasher, laundry machine all of the places where you'd get water throughout the house to have a better quality of water than what's actually being sent to you, whether it's from the well or from the municipal water supply. And so that's what point of entry is. We want to treat all the water to a certain level. If you have sediment in the water, we don't want that plugging up your faucets and dishwasher jets and your shower head. We want to clean that out before it gets there, and so you want a sediment filter to make sure that gets removed. If you're on well water and you have iron, you don't want that in the house. So you have to have something to remove that iron before it comes in, because it will stain and destroy everything it touches. If you have a sulfur smell, you want to make sure that you remove that smell before it starts coming out your faucet when you turn it on, because no one wants to take a shower in that water.

Speaker 3:

If you think about the water that's coming from the city, you know they put a bunch of sanitizer in across the board. Now I think almost all the utility companies are using a bromide for sanitization and and they put an excessive amount in. It's only necessary to have about 0.2 parts per million to keep the water sanitary, and most of the municipal water supply has somewhere around three or four parts per million. So 0.2 is necessary, and three to four is what's typically in the water that we're getting at our house. And that's because, you know, as the community grows, as we add more lines of service, they have to make sure the water stays sanitary all the way to the last house, and so, because of that burden that's on them, they're going to add more than would be ideal just to make sure the water stays sanitary. So we don't want to have all that in the water that we're showering in.

Speaker 3:

A lot of people find out that their skin might get extra red from the shower. It's not because the water is too hot, it's because there's a lot of chemical in that water and so having a carbon filter to remove that for the entire house is a really great way to help keep those things that are toxic to the body away from the body and you want to get rid of that smell. Nobody likes to get a cup of water and it smells like a swimming pool. That's not something that we enjoy, and so those are sorts of things that whole house filtration can help remove, as well as most people almost everywhere. I think.

Speaker 3:

I'm trying to think of a couple areas around Johnson City area. There's some Jonesboro. Some of the Jonesboro water is not very hard two or three grains of hardness and that means that they can have a water softener or not have a water softener. It's kind of a decision that they can make, but I would say that anywhere else, almost everywhere else in our area the Tri-Cities has a water hardness level of above three grains of hardness. Some of it's all the way up to 10, like up and along the Virginia line, from Rogersville all the way to nearly Bristol. Water hardness is pretty high.

Speaker 3:

And for your home, what is water hardness? Water hardness is minerals that are dissolved in the water. So it's calcium, magnesium, could be lead, could be iron, things like that that they're dissolved in the water and when you mix soap in with that it makes a soap curd or soap scum and you probably see that on your shower, you see it on your dishes. That's why people use jet dry and other things like that. And so when we don't remove that hardness, we end up using more chemicals in our life to kind of offset the results or what that causes, and so we have a lot more cleaning to do.

Speaker 3:

We have to have harsher chemicals and that causes us to spend more money. So having untreated water is expensive and it costs money also to put the equipment in to treat the water. So as far as expense goes, it's kind of like this is going to cost me in to treat the water. So as far as expense goes, it's kind of like this is going to cost me money to treat the water, but it's also going to cost me money to not treat the water. So with treated water at least you get a good quality of life and a better water quality. That's more kind to your senses and feel, to your body. But when you don't treat the water it's going to cost you more in soaps and cleaning products and you'll replace appliances and faucets and fixtures more often.

Speaker 2:

And I would imagine over time that would be more expensive than just getting a filtration system.

Speaker 3:

It absolutely is the whole house water treatment system. If you've got your standard family of four, typically the water treatment system pays for itself within about five years of ownership. So that means that if you stay in a house for 10 years, you literally the system has paid for itself twice in that timeframe. So let's just imagine, for instance, you wanted to invest some money. Skip, you're making a lot of money and you want to invest some money. So you go to an investment professional and you say, hey, where can I get 100% return in the next 60 months? And they say, good luck. Well, with me that's an everyday situation, every single day. I can give 100% return within 60 months. Whoever invests in water treatment can typically make their money back in savings over what they are already spending in their life, and then, after that's paid for itself, then you'll be saving that much every single year.

Speaker 2:

Wow. So in addition to being healthier and putting less toxins in your body, you can save money too.

Speaker 3:

And it's a great standard of living. Can you imagine having less skin irritation from contaminants that are left on your body and having a better quality of water that you enjoy to drink? We were talking about this before the show, and those are things that everybody wants, but it costs money to have them. Well, what people don't really realize is it costs money to not fix the water as well.

Speaker 2:

Very good, very good. Good to know, dan. Thanks for another deep splash sorry for the pun into smarter water choices and appreciate you all walking us through the point of entry landscape. We'll see you next time when I think we'll talk about oh gosh, not point of entry but point of use, point of use, point of use, pou. All right, man, have a great rest of the day.

Speaker 1:

You too, thanks, skip have a great rest of the day, you too. Thanks, skip. Thank you for joining us on the Mountain View Pure podcast. When you're ready to transform your home's water and air quality, call or text 423-218-9361 for a free in-home consultation. For more information, visit mvpwaternet. Remember, great water is the foundation of a great life.