The man who does your water test owns the company

Meet Michael Battaglia

“I test it in front of you, and you read it with me.”

I didn’t come up in the water business. I came to it the way most of my customers do — by wondering what was actually in the water coming out of my own tap, and finding out how few people around here could give me a straight answer. So I went and learned it properly, from the utilities’ own reports up.

Here is the thing almost nobody in this county will tell you: there is no such thing as “Palm Beach County water”. Palm Beach County Water Utilities runs its eastern system on chloramine and its western system on chlorine, drawing from wells twelve hundred feet down. Seacoast runs Palm Beach Gardens and North Palm Beach largely on nanofiltration. Boca Raton softens at its own plant and publishes the number. Out in The Acreage and Loxahatchee, plenty of homes are on a well that nobody treats at all. Two houses a few miles apart are not drinking the same water.

Which means a company quoting you off a county average is guessing, and you are the one who pays for the guess. I would rather measure. I do the test myself at your kitchen sink, you read the result standing next to me, and then I tell you which system that result calls for and exactly what it costs.

We have both lived in Palm Beach County our whole lives and have worked for ourselves here for years, so this is our own town’s water we are talking about, not a territory somebody assigned us.

What we found when we started looking at this industry was a lot of theatre. Appointments that run three hours at somebody’s kitchen table. Prices that move depending on whether you look likely to say yes tonight. Equipment marked up several times over.

So Honest Water Co. of the Palm Beaches is deliberately the opposite of that. I test your water at your own sink, free, and you read the result standing next to me rather than waiting on an emailed PDF. You get one price, and it is the price — installation included, and a lifetime warranty on the equipment.

Then I build what your result actually calls for. Sometimes that is a softener and a carbon tank in the garage. Sometimes it is reverse osmosis under the kitchen sink and nothing else. Out west it is a full well build with the iron and the sulfur dealt with first. What it is never is whichever system happens to be easiest to sell that week.