Nobody discloses water hardness at closing. If the house came with a softener, nobody tells you whether it still works either. Here's what to check in your first few months — most of it you can do yourself in ten minutes.
Water problems are easy to normalize. Six months in, the spotted glassware is just how your glassware looks, the crust on the shower door is a Saturday chore, and the extra detergent is just what you buy. People who've lived somewhere for years often stop noticing entirely — which is exactly why a home inspection turns up a cracked roof tile but never mentions that the water is 15 grains per gallon.
Right after a move, you still have a baseline. You remember what the water was like at your last place. If your soap suddenly stops lathering or your skin feels different, you notice it. That's useful information, and it fades.
There's a practical reason too. If you're already having a plumber out, already painting, already replacing a water heater the inspector flagged — adding a softener to that window is cheaper and less disruptive than doing it as a standalone project two years later.
One thing worth knowing about Florida. Hardness varies enormously by ZIP code, not just by city. JEA publishes readings for all 41 of its Jacksonville ZIP codes and they range from 7 to 22 grains per gallon — a threefold difference inside one metro. If you moved across town, your water genuinely changed. If you moved from out of state, it almost certainly did.
These are the utilities' own published figures, not our estimates. Find your metro, then check your specific ZIP — or let us test at the tap.
Plenty of Florida homes have one in the garage. A fair number of those haven't worked in years — the previous owner stopped buying salt, or a valve failed and nobody replaced it. You can check most of this yourself before calling anyone.
Open the shorter of the two tanks. If it's empty, or the salt has hardened into a solid crust across the top — a “salt bridge” — the system hasn't been regenerating. That alone tells you it hasn't been treating your water, possibly for a long time.
Most softeners have a control head on top of the tall tank with a display or a dial. If it's dark, unplugged, or flashing an error, it isn't running. A blinking clock usually just means a power outage reset it.
There's usually a bypass valve where the unit ties into the main line. If someone set it to bypass to troubleshoot a leak and never set it back, the softener is plumbed in but water is routing straight around it.
Look for a date or serial on the control head or tank label. Softeners typically last 15 to 20 years with maintenance. Resin degrades faster on chlorinated water, so an old unit may run fine and still not soften much.
The honest answer on repair versus replace. If the unit is under about ten years old, from a known valve brand, and the only problem is an empty salt tank or a bypass left open, you may not need us at all — add salt, put it back in service, and re-test in a week. We'd rather tell you that than sell you something.
If the resin is spent, the valve has failed, or nobody can identify the brand well enough to source parts, replacement usually makes more sense than repair. The free test settles it either way: we measure the water coming out of the system, and either it's soft or it isn't.
None of this requires a technician. Work through it in an afternoon and you'll know whether you have a problem worth spending money on.
Softens, refines and filters in one tank, on the main line. 30,000 grain capacity with a Fleck 5600 metered valve and a 5-year warranty. Typically a single half-day visit, which is easy to fit into a move-in window when you already have trades in the house.
Pro Plus detailsAn under-sink reverse osmosis unit for drinking and cooking. Cheaper to install at the same time as the softener than as a separate visit later, and it's the right answer if taste or contaminants are your concern rather than scale.
RO detailsA technician comes out, tests your water at the tap, and shows you the results on the spot. It takes about twenty minutes and costs nothing. If you don't want a system afterward, that's a perfectly fine outcome.
After, and ideally within the first month or two. Testing the tap in an empty house is fine, but water that's been sitting in unused pipes isn't representative. Once you're living there and running water normally, you get a real reading.
It's worth verifying. A softener can be powered, full of salt and still not softening if the resin is exhausted — there's no warning light for that. We test the water coming out of the system, which is the only thing that actually settles it.
Before drywall if you can, so the loop and drain get roughed in properly. Many Florida builders pre-plumb a softener loop in the garage even when they don't install a unit. If yours did, installation later is straightforward. If they didn't, it's worth asking now.
We won't claim a specific dollar figure — we haven't seen credible data on it, and anyone quoting you one probably hasn't either. What we can say is that in a market where most buyers have lived with hard water, a working system is a real selling point, and a dead one in the garage is a question mark.
Not installed — a softener ties into the home's main water line, so the property owner has to authorize it. We're still happy to test your water and tell you what's in it, and to give you something concrete to take to your landlord.