Health parameters
Arsenic, nitrate, nitrite, fluoride, uranium, lead, copper, selenium, barium and the rest of the primary contaminant list. These are the ones with legal limits attached.
Water testing
Certified water testing in Prescott — $185
53 parameters, run by a certified laboratory, sampled at your house, with someone sitting down afterwards to explain what the numbers mean. Flat $185, no trip fee anywhere in Yavapai County.
The lab
Who actually runs the panel
The samples go to SimpleLab, an independent testing network, and the analysis is done in a certified laboratory — not in the back of a van and not by CreekWell. That matters, because the company recommending treatment should not also be the company producing the number that justifies it.
You can check this yourself rather than taking our word for it. Arizona requires drinking water compliance analysis to be performed by laboratories certified by the EPA or the Arizona Department of Health Services, and ADHS publishes a searchable list of every certified lab in the state: the ADHS certified drinking water laboratory search. If anyone quotes you a water result, ask which lab produced it and look them up there.
The report comes back to you directly. It is your document — if you want a second opinion on what it means, you can hand it to anyone.
What the panel covers
The $185 panel is a full drinking-water workup, not a strip test. It reports:
Nuisance parameters
Hardness, iron, manganese, sulfate, chloride, total dissolved solids, alkalinity and pH — the ones behind scale, staining, taste and short appliance life.
Bacteria
Total coliform and E. coli. The single most important test on a private well, and the one no meter or filter can tell you about.
Private wells
Why wells need this more than city water does
A public water system is tested on a schedule and has to publish the results. A private well is tested when the owner decides to test it, and nobody else is checking.
Yavapai County wells vary enormously well to well. Arsenic in particular is a known regional issue — the EPA maximum contaminant level is 10 micrograms per liter, and readings far above that have been recorded in the county, including in the Cornville area. There is no legal limit on a private well, which means the only limit is the one you decide to apply.
If you have bought a house with a well, or have not tested in three years, or anyone in the house is pregnant or an infant, that is the moment to run the panel.
Timing
When you should test
If you are on a private well, once a year is the baseline and nobody will do it for you. The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality is plain about this: ADEQ “does not regulate the water quality of private wells,” and private well owners “are responsible for maintaining their well(s).” The University of Arizona puts the same thing less gently — Arizona Cooperative Extension AZ1486f says “No one else will test your water for you.”
Six situations are worth a test. The first applies to every well in the county. The rest apply to anyone.
- Once a year, on a well, whether or not anything has changed. Both EPA and CDC say to test a private well at least once every year for total coliform bacteria, nitrates, total dissolved solids and pH — an annual cadence exists because groundwater changes slowly and you will not notice it doing so.
- You just bought the house, or you are about to. AZ1486f lists testing “before buying or selling a home with a private well” as a specific trigger, because the previous owner's word is not a record and in most of Yavapai County there is no record.
- The taste, the smell or the color changed. EPA says to test when “you notice a change in your water quality (i.e. odor, color, taste)” — not because the change itself is the danger, but because it means something upstream moved.
- Somebody is pregnant, or there is an infant in the house. CDC lists pregnancy and a child moving in as their own triggers, and EPA is specific about the reason: do not mix well water containing more than 10 milligrams per liter of nitrate with infant formula or food.
- You replaced or repaired any part of the well. Pump, casing, pressure tank, piping — EPA, CDC and AZ1486f all name well work as a trigger, because opening a sealed system is how surface bacteria get into a deep one.
- Flooding, land disturbance, new construction or industrial activity nearby. EPA names these directly, and adds a table matching land use to what to look for: mining operations to metals and pH, agriculture to nitrate and coliform, landfills and industrial sites to volatile organic compounds and metals.
One more that is not a hazard, just arithmetic: AZ1486f recommends testing before and after installing any water treatment system. Before, so the equipment is sized to a number instead of a guess. After, so you can prove it worked. A system nobody re-tested is a system nobody has verified.
The paperwork
How to read your lab report
A lab report is a stack of rows, and every row says the same five things: what was measured, what your water came back at, in what unit, what the limit is, and whether you are over it. Once you can read one row you can read all of them.
Take a real one. Arsenic, result 18 µg/L, MCL 0.010 mg/L, flagged.
What MCL means
MCL is the Maximum Contaminant Level. EPA defines it as “the highest level of a contaminant that is allowed in drinking water,” set “as close to MCLGs as feasible using the best available treatment technology and taking cost into consideration.” MCLs are enforceable standards — on a public water system. On a private well nobody enforces anything, so the MCL is a reference line you decide whether to respect.
Sitting behind it is the MCLG, the Maximum Contaminant Level Goal: “the level of a contaminant in drinking water below which there is no known or expected risk to health.” The gap between an MCLG and an MCL is the gap between what is safe and what is achievable at a cost. For arsenic that gap is real. For lead the MCLG is zero.
The units, and why there are three of them
EPA's table states it in one line: “Units are in milligrams per liter (mg/L) unless otherwise noted. Milligrams per liter are equivalent to parts per million (PPM).” AZ1486f gives the other half: “Part per billion (ppb) = microgram per liter of water = µg/L.”
So there are two units wearing four names:
- 1 mg/L = 1 ppm
- 1 µg/L = 1 ppb
- 1 mg/L = 1,000 µg/L
Which makes the arsenic MCL of 0.010 mg/L the same number as 10 µg/L and the same number as 10 ppb. A result of 18 µg/L is 0.018 mg/L, which is 1.8 times the limit. Most of the confusion in a lab report is a decimal point, not a chemical.
What a non-detect means
ND, or <0.5, or “non-detect,” does not mean zero. It means the concentration was below the lowest level that method could reliably measure. AZ1486f has you compare three numbers to read a row: the laboratory's minimum detection limit, EPA's MCL, and your own result. If the detection limit is higher than the limit you care about, a non-detect tells you very little — which is why the method matters as much as the answer.
Action level is not an MCL
Lead and copper have no MCL. EPA regulates both with a Treatment Technique instead — “a required process intended to reduce the level of a contaminant” — with an Action Level of 0.015 mg/L for lead and 1.3 mg/L for copper. EPA describes it as “the concentration of a contaminant which, if exceeded, triggers treatment actions or other requirements.”
Two things follow, and both matter when you are holding your own report.
First, the action level is a system-wide statistic. It applies to the 90th percentile of tap samples across a whole water system — if more than ten percent of samples exceed it, the utility has to act. Your house is one sample. There is no 90th percentile of one.
Second, it was never a safety line. EPA has “set the maximum contaminant level goal for lead in drinking water at zero because lead is a toxic metal that can be harmful to human health even at low exposure levels.” The action level is where a utility's obligations begin, not where harm does. EPA has already scheduled it downward: “Beginning on the LCRI compliance date of November 1, 2027, systems must comply with the revised lead action level of 0.010 mg/L.”
Lead also does not arrive from the aquifer. It “can enter drinking water when plumbing materials that contain lead corrode,” which is EPA's way of saying a lead result is a fact about your house, not about your source. And “since you cannot see, taste, or smell lead dissolved in water, testing is the only sure way of telling whether there are harmful quantities of lead in your drinking water.”
The rows with no health limit at all
Hardness, iron, manganese, total dissolved solids, sulfate, chloride and pH are compared to Secondary Maximum Contaminant Levels — iron 0.3 mg/L, manganese 0.05 mg/L, TDS 500 mg/L, pH 6.5 to 8.5. These are “non-mandatory water quality standards,” EPA does not enforce them, and “these contaminants are not considered to present a risk to human health at the SMCL.” They are the taste, staining and scale rows. Being over one of them is an appliance problem. It is not a health finding, and anybody who presents it as one is selling.
The difference
Field check versus certified lab panel
A handheld meter and a laboratory do not measure the same class of thing, and the gap is not about quality of equipment. It is about physics. A meter reads a bulk electrical or optical property of the water in front of it. A laboratory identifies specific atoms and grows specific organisms. No amount of money spent on a meter closes that gap.
Arizona already draws this line in its own rules. The state's drinking water field method guidance approves field testing for a short list — total chlorine, free chlorine, chloramine, chlorine dioxide, chlorite and turbidity — and states that otherwise “analysis of drinking water samples shall be conducted by laboratories that have been certified by EPA or the Arizona Department of Health Services.” That is the whole argument, written by the state, before anyone knocked on your door.
| Parameter | Field meter | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Hardness | Yes | Titration or a conductivity-derived estimate. Good enough to size a softener, which is all it is for. |
| Free and total chlorine | Yes | A color-change reaction. One of the few things Arizona approves as a field method. |
| Total dissolved solids | Yes, indirectly | A TDS pen measures electrical conductivity and multiplies by a factor. It tells you how much dissolved material is present. It cannot tell you what any of it is. |
| pH | Yes | A direct electrode reading, and a genuinely useful one — pH drives both corrosion and whether some arsenic treatment will work at all. |
| Arsenic | No | The limit is 10 parts per billion. Identifying an element at that concentration is the job of an instrument such as ICP-MS, which is what EPA Method 200.8 specifies. It does not fit in a toolbox. |
| Bacteria — coliform, E. coli | No | You are looking for living organisms. They have to be cultured and incubated. There is nothing to read on a screen until something grows. |
| Nitrate | No | Needs a colorimetric or ion-chromatography method against calibrated standards. Dissolved nitrate changes conductivity like every other dissolved salt, so a TDS pen cannot separate it from anything else. |
| Lead and copper | No | Trace metals at the same parts-per-billion scale as arsenic, and both come from your own plumbing rather than the source, so the sample has to be collected a particular way before it is worth analyzing at all. |
| Uranium | No | The MCL is 30 µg/L. Same instrument problem as arsenic. |
So the field check answers one question: how hard is it, is there chlorine in it, roughly how much is dissolved in it, and what is the pH. That is enough to size treatment and nothing else. The lab answers whether the water is safe, and there is no shortcut to it.
The practical consequence is worth stating plainly. If somebody tests your water at your kitchen sink with a handheld device and then tells you it is unsafe, they have not measured anything that supports the sentence. Arizona's list of licensed commercial drinking water laboratories is published by the Arizona Department of Health Services, and anyone can look at it.
Service status — September 2026
Rebranding, and adding licenses
Aqua Cat Plumbing & Water Treatment is now CreekWell Plumbing & Water Treatment. Same owner, same phone number.
We are adding Arizona contractor licenses, and we are not booking new work until that is done — a few weeks. Jobs already on the schedule are not affected.
For new work, hold a place in the first round or call or text 928-228-5770. Bookings go in the order they come in, at the prices published on this site. No deposit.
Straight answers
Questions we get asked
Can you come out right now?
Not for new work. We are rebranding and adding Arizona contractor licenses, and we are not booking new jobs for a few weeks. Jobs already on the schedule are not affected.
Leave your name on the list or call or text 928-228-5770. Bookings go in the order they come in, at the prices published on this site, with no deposit.
How much does a water test cost in Prescott?
$185 for the 53-parameter certified laboratory panel, flat rate.
That covers sample collection at your home, the lab analysis and a walk-through of the results. A free hardness, chlorine and TDS field check comes with any estimate at no charge. There is no trip fee anywhere in Yavapai County.
How long until I get results?
About a week for the full laboratory panel.
The field check is immediate. Bacteria results come back faster than the full chemistry, and if there is a bacterial hit you hear about it straight away rather than waiting for the rest.
How often should a private well be tested?
Bacteria annually; the full chemistry every three years, and after any change.
Also test after work on the well, after flooding or heavy monsoon runoff, if the taste or color changes, or before you buy the property. A well that was clean five years ago is not evidence about today.
Can I just use a home test kit?
For hardness, yes. For anything with a health limit, no.
Strip kits are fine for a rough hardness number. They are not accurate at the concentrations that matter for arsenic or nitrate, and they do not culture bacteria. The gap between a strip and a certified lab is the difference between a hint and an answer.
Not a licensed contractor
Work is performed under the Arizona handyman exemption, A.R.S. § 32-1121(A)(14): any single project is limited to less than $1,000 including labor and materials, and excludes work requiring a building permit and all natural gas and propane work. Neil Staiger has 32 years of Arizona plumbing experience and holds current manufacturer certifications from Moen, Kohler, Navien, Rinnai and Charger Water Treatment Products. More about that. Additional Arizona contractor licenses are in progress.
The list
Hold a place in the first round of appointments
New work is not being booked for a few weeks while we rebrand and add contractor licenses. Jobs already scheduled are not affected.