Can anyone recommend a good water hardness test kit or strips that I can buy from a local/chain store? I want to test my water harness so I can plan my plumb in strategy, but the only kits I can find online cost more to ship, then the kits themselves!

I have used the SofChek test strips available here:

http://www.diywatertesting.com/sofchekx3.html

They have reasonable sensitivity and clear color changes so that they are easy to read. Some of the strips I have seen do not have clear color differences and are very hard to read with any degree of certainty.

Good luck,
Mark

I have been using the Aquarium Pharmaceuticals kit #58 which has the tests for both general hardness as well as carbonate hardness. Comes with vials which you fill to a line with the water to be tested, then add drops of an included chemical while counting the drops. When it turns from the color of the drops to a different color you refer to an included chart for the conversion. Depending on the contents of the water being tested (and thus the number of drops needed to complete the test), one kit could do well over 100 tests. With water softened with an ion exchange system, one drop can verify that it is working so that might be couple of hundred tests per kit. Very hard water (around 250 TDS) takes about 22 drops, but once you hit about 15 the point has been made. For water being softened, the GH test isn't really valuable because you are exchanging the carbonate (hardness for sodium ions, so the GH stays about the same pre and post treatment. In that case, just the carbonate test would be sufficient and it is available separately.

You can often find this basic http://www.tdsmeter.com/products/tdsez.htmlelectronic TDS meter between $20-$40 dollars.

I bought one from a local water testing facility that supplies them to Culligan.

Works like a charm.

John P wrote:You can often find this basic http://www.tdsmeter.com/products/tdsez.htmlelectronic TDS meter between $20-$40 dollars.

I bought one from a local water testing facility that supplies them to Culligan.

Works like a charm.

The problem with TDS meters is that they do not differentiate between scaling and non-scaling solids in the water. My TDS meter reads the same pre and post softening, as does the General Hardness portion of the test kit I mentioned in my above post, but the Carbonate hardness test indicates zero carbonate post softening.

Aquarium Pharmaceuticals kit #58 is will do the job much better and more accurately than tests strips, and they're very reasonably priced.

However, I'm OCD about measuring accuracy, so I use Hach test kits.

Here are several Hach kits for testing hardness

The kits with the larger sample flask are capable of accurately measuring low levels of hardness. The other kits have a base resolution of 17 ppm.

Here are several Hach kits for testing alkalinity