How the match works
Three things, in that order:
- What’s in the water. Hardness is not iron. Iron is not sulfur. Chlorine is not chloramine. We use the utility report or a certified lab, not a salesman vial.
- Where the brine would go. Salt softeners dump salty waste. Some sanitation districts forbid that. Santa Clarita Valley / LACSD is the first one we wrote up. It is not “banned in California.”
- What the box actually does. Softening removes calcium and magnesium. A salt-free unit does not. Carbon is for disinfectant taste, unless the exact model has a different listing.
What we will not write
No diagnosing illness from a water report. No “removes all toxins.” No “protects you from cancer.” PFAS, lead, and fluoride stay on NSF/ANSI 53/58 language for the exact model.
We are not a dealer, NSF, WQA, or your utility. We do not scrape well tests. ZIP lookup uses the GeoNames postal-code file, mapped at build time onto city files we already have. It is not a live utility API.
Citations
District pages, city code, EPA, USGS, utility water-quality reports, manufacturer sheets when we name a media. If we cannot check it, we leave it out. No invented prices or rebate numbers.
Shopping links
Shop buttons lead with tagged Amazon links (`tag=tapmatch-20`). Where we have a real product ASIN — under-sink RO, whole-house carbon, salt softener, salt-free conditioner — the button goes to that listing. Other categories stay on Amazon search. Kitchen RO buttons are the Amazon listing, then Cloud RO, then Waterdrop. If you buy through a link, we may earn a commission. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. We do not make medical claims.