#2 How do I find out what’s in MY water?

Since we’re studying the impact of components in your water on tree health, it probably makes sense to be able to figure out what is in our water in the first place. In this article I’ll teach you multiple ways to check your water parameters and highlight some of the parameters we’ll start studying to see their impact on soil chemistry and our plants.

Option 1 - Review Your Municipalities Annual Water Report

For most of us, there is a very easy, free way to find our water parameters. Water utility companies in the US are required to submit a “Customer Confidence Report” explaining the parameters of their water for everyone. [1] If your water is provided by a public utility, you can simply Google “<Utility name> Water Quality Report <year>”Here is an example for my water in San Francisco from 2022. It is a 12 page report but I just grabbed the most important page for our purposes. Sometimes your utility only provides a few parameters and you can usually email to ask them for a full report like below:

Figure 1: Water quality report data for SFPUC from 2022.

https://sfpuc.org/accounts-services/water-quality/annual-triennial-water-quality-reports

There’s a lot in this report, and we’ll dive into the specifics in future articles as we pick out which parameters are important to measure. Meanwhile let’s check out options 2 and 3.

Option 2 - At Home Testing

Sometimes you may be on well water or just want to verify the water report to make sure it is accurate. In this case, a great option is to test the water yourself! The parameters I’m most familiar with testing are:

TDS, pH, General Hardness/Carbonate Hardness 

TDS - Total Dissolved Solids - You can buy a super cheap ($8-$11) digital meter. My old one died and so I bought this one to replace it recently. These are super simple, you just click the on button and put the tip in the water and it will give you a readout of the number of ions in the water in (ppm - parts per million). This is nice to have to test your drinking water also.

pH - For pH, you can do a mini science lab and use one of the API test kits (low pH, high pH). These are for measuring pH for fish tanks and are very simple to operate. Another option is to get a digital meter like this one which is what I usually use since I used it fairly regularly when I had saltwater fish tanks. If you get a digital meter, you’ll also need to make sure you get calibration fluids to cover the range you wish to test. For example, the meter I linked comes with pH 7 and pH 4 calibration solutions, but does not include a pH 10 solution so if you want to measure pH in the 7-10 range, you would also want to purchase that calibration solution.

GH/KH - General Hardness is the amount of calcium and magnesium ions in the water. Carbonate Hardness is the amount of carbonates and bicarbonates in the water. Here’s the API test kit that can test for both of these parameters. 

There are test kits for many of the parameters listed above, so you can go pretty wild if you’d like. I just wanted to highlight the ones I was personally familiar with and which we’ll be researching first. 

Option 3 - Professional Testing

There are many companies that do in depth water chemistry analysis. The company I’ve used in the past is actually shutting down, but this seems to be an equivalent test. These professional tests are fairly reasonably priced(~$45) and can give you very detailed information if you are using well water or don’t have a water report for your municipality. 

Appendix

[1] CCR Information for Consumers | US EPA. (2023, September 6). US EPA. https://www.epa.gov/ccr/ccr-information-consumers