About us

We help homeowners pick, size and run water treatment: salt softeners, iron and sulfur filters, and salt-free conditioners. Most of our readers are on a private well with a water test in hand, or on city water with scale they are tired of scrubbing.

Who we are

This site is written by a small editorial team, credited as “Grain & Gallon Editors”. We don’t invent personas or credentials. We are not water treatment dealers, we don’t sell or install equipment, and no manufacturer reviews our articles before they go up.

We also don’t claim to have tested the products we cover. Nobody here has installed these softeners and measured the water coming out. What we do instead is research, and we say so on every page where it matters.

How we research

Almost every decision about a softener or iron filter comes down to numbers the makers and extension services already publish. So we go to those sources and show our working:

• Owner’s manuals and spec sheets. Manuals list the limits that marketing pages leave out: maximum iron, maximum hardness, minimum pH, minimum supply flow, capacity at each salt setting and water used per regeneration. We quote the manual and link to it.
• University extension services. Penn State Extension, NDSU Extension and Nebraska Extension publish the treatment ranges we use for iron, manganese, hydrogen sulfide and hardness, and the figures for water and salt use.
• Industry standards and design guidance. We cite the NSF/ANSI 44 standard for residential softeners, NSF’s pages on the other water treatment standards, and design tables from Water Conditioning & Purification magazine.
• Owner reports. Forums and owner questions tell us where products fail in real homes. We use them to find problems worth checking, and we label them as owner reports, not facts.

Every calculator on the site shows its formula and cites the source for each constant. When sources disagree (on how much iron a softener can handle, for example), we show each figure and explain why they differ. When a maker doesn’t publish a limit, we write “not published” rather than guess.

How we rank products (and why there are no star ratings)

We don’t give products a score out of five. A star rating implies we measured something, and without hands-on testing a 4.5 against a 4.0 would be false precision.

Instead, each recommendation gets a label for a specific job, such as “best for high flow” or “best budget pick”. We decide those labels by comparing, in this order:

1. Fit for the water. The maker’s own limits for iron, hardness, pH and flow, checked against the extension ranges for the problem the article covers.
2. How much the maker publishes. A product whose manual states its iron limit, salt-dose capacity and regeneration water ranks above one that leaves them out, because you can check it against your own test.
3. Running cost. Capacity at an efficient salt setting and water per regeneration, where published.
4. Where you can buy it. A clear online buy path, preferably from more than one seller.

Every pick lists its real downsides and who it doesn’t suit.

How we’re funded

Some links on this site go to retailers and brands whose affiliate programs we have applied to or plan to join. Once a program approves us, those links become affiliate links: if you buy through them, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Commission never decides what we recommend: some of the products we recommend have no affiliate program at all, and we link to them anyway with a plain link and say so. Our affiliate disclosure lists the retailers whose links may earn us a commission. We never show prices, because they change too often to be accurate in an article.

What we don’t cover

We cover the nuisance side of water: hardness, iron, manganese, sulfur smell and pH where it affects equipment. We don’t give advice on health-related contaminants such as bacteria, nitrate, arsenic, lead or PFAS, and we don’t answer “is my water safe to drink”.

For health-related contaminants, test with a certified lab and choose equipment certified to the matching NSF/ANSI standard. Your state health department or county extension office can point you to certified labs, and NSF’s overview of water treatment standards explains which standard covers which kind of system.

Corrections

If you spot a number that doesn’t match its source, or a product whose specs have changed, tell us at site.factory.system@gmail.com. We correct errors and note material changes on the page.