Kinetico Mermaid Water

I had read their ad for years in the South County Gazette. Lured by the big color photos of the This Old House guru with his Kinetico system, we felt that it must be the best and we wanted something really good after years of fighting to keep the rust out of our well water. We also liked that fact that the system was always "on" and not off when flushing likely about once a day.

We should have been tipped off by the attitude of the salesman. When we first balked at adding the drinking water filtration system under the sink, he accused us of not caring about what our children ingested and got angry and took our "no" very personally. Obviously it was tactic that worked with me even though it upset me because I persuaded my husband to go with it anyway.

The fellow that installed it was very skilled, we felt, and honest. We liked his attitude and was pleased. When we had problems, they sent out a second serviceman. This one was brand new and fumbled to figure out what to do. He left his kit at our house and had to retrieve it later. We asked about the first guy to find he had left the company after revealing to us that he had no intentions of leaving. When we continued to have problems, the salesman who sold it to us came to our house because they had fired the last guy by now. This time he was very nasty to us and it was clear we had made a terrible mistake.

Immediately we had problems in that the system's force was so powerful that it was forcing sediment from the bottom of our well into our system cutting off water to our home. Mermad simply switched the installation of a filter on the system to the other side which made no sense and did nothing whatsover. We called in another company who installed a sand filter that we could flush (we have to do this now whenever we want a shower - what a pain) and said ultimately it would cost another $2K to have a depth filter installed to remedy it or more to replace the whole system and make the problem go away. They couldn't work on the system really themselves since it required special tools they didn't have access to.

Also, despite the 10 year (?) warranty, Mermaid reminds us we need annual maintenance each year but we haven't bothered and don't intend to spend more on this. The system does need some tweaking as rust is beginning to show again inside our toilets.

The water treatment system in our kitchen shuts off automatically after a certain # of gallons so we now have to pay $116 a year to use it to replace the 2 filters inside it, ONLY available from Mermaid. Figures.

So all in all, we view this as one big, fat, expensive mistake and wish we had called another place first. Don't be "dazzled" by their promises like I was.