Varify Water Hardness Test Kit - Water Testing Kit for Home, Drinking, Well, Spa, Swimming Pool, Softener, Dishwasher & More - Hard Water Test Strips for Calcium, Magnesium etc (0-425 pmm, 150 Strips)
# I Tested Our Water. Here's What the Strips Told Me.
For a long time, I ignored our water. Not in a careless way — more in a "I can't see a problem so there probably isn't one" way. The dishwasher left white film on glasses. The kettle had crusty buildup on the bottom. The shower head dribbled instead of sprayed. I blamed the appliances.
Then a friend mentioned she'd tested her well water and found calcium levels high enough to shorten the life of her water heater. That made me look at things differently.
I picked up the Varify Water Hardness Test Kit. 150 strips, 0 to 425 ppm range, measures calcium and magnesium hardness. The box is small. The strips are smaller. I wasn't expecting much.
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You dip a strip for a couple of seconds, pull it out, and wait. The color change tells you where you fall on the hardness scale. Our kitchen tap came back around 200 ppm. Hard water. Not the worst reading possible, but enough to explain the kettle scaling, the cloudy glassware, and the fact that our water softener output looked almost identical to the tap — which meant something was off.
I tested the bathroom faucet next. Similar reading. The softener output came back a bit lower, which at least told me it was doing *something*. Then I tested a few others: refrigerator filter, my parents' house a few miles away, the hose bib outside. The hose bib reading was slightly lower, probably because of a different pipe path. I don't know what I expected to do with that information, but I found it interesting.
The strips are simple to use. The color matching is less simple. Somewhere in the 150 to 250 ppm range, the pads all look vaguely orange and you're squinting at printed swatches that don't look all that different from each other. I used two strips on one test because I wasn't sure about my first read. That's not a dealbreaker — it's just worth knowing that this isn't a precise instrument.
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Hard water isn't a health issue. Calcium and magnesium are minerals you need, and drinking hard water causes no problems. The issue is what those minerals leave behind when water evaporates or heats up: scale on heating elements, deposits inside pipes and appliances, spots on glass, and soap that won't lather properly because the minerals interfere with it. Over years, the appliance damage adds up. A water heater running inefficiently because of internal scale costs more to operate and fails earlier than it should.
If you already have a water softener, testing is the only way to know if the settings are right. Too low and it's not protecting anything. Too high and you're wasting salt. You need a number to calibrate against.
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My first reaction to 150 strips was that it seemed excessive. Over two days I ended up testing eight different sources and used maybe twelve strips. The remaining ones will go toward periodic rechecks — you want to verify after adjusting a softener, for instance, and then again a few months later. People with spas or pools will go through strips faster since those systems need regular balance checks.
A few things the kit won't tell you: the breakdown of calcium versus magnesium specifically (just total hardness), pH, chlorine, lead, or anything microbial. Varify makes separate kits for those. This one does one thing and doesn't try to do more than that.
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We adjusted our softener after testing. The white film on dishes improved within about a week. I can't prove causality — maybe it would have improved anyway, or maybe we'd just been running low on rinse aid — but the timing lines up. Either way, I know more about our water now than I did before, and the guessing about the appliances has mostly stopped.
If you've never tested your water and you've got a water softener, a well, or just a dishwasher that's been leaving spots for years, it's a $15 answer to a question you've probably been ignoring.