For Water Filter Installers
Close more deals. Book more meetings. Be the only installer in your ZIP doing it.
A 15-minute in-home microplastics demo — built for residential water filter installers. Your customer watches plastic from their own tap water glow pink on a filter, on their kitchen table. No lab, no send-out, no PDF. Just visible evidence they're holding in their hand.
Microplastics is the only water-quality story on the news right now — blood, breast milk, arterial plaque. Homeowners are concerned and they want answers. Nobody in your service area is offering this test today. First one in becomes “the plastic-light guy” on the neighborhood Facebook page.
What this does for your business
Three things, in plain English.
You close more of the calls you're already on.
Reps run the same 10 sales calls a month they always do. The difference is what the homeowner sees on the kitchen table at minute 14 — pink dots glowing on a filter pulled from a glass of their own water. There's no objection to a thing they're holding. Close rate goes up because the demo is no longer a number on a meter.
You book more meetings in the first place.
“Free water quality test” is a tired hook. “Free 15-minute microplastics test — same method UCLA researchers use” is not. Microplastics is in every health-news cycle: blood, breast milk, arterial plaque. People want to know what's in their water. You become the one offering the answer, not another softener pitch.
You're the only installer in your area doing this.
No competitor in your ZIP code is running an in-home microplastics demo today, because the test didn't exist for residential dealers until now. First mover gets the local news segments, the neighborhood-Facebook word of mouth, the “the guy who has the plastic-light thing” reputation. We only sign one dealer per service area through the pilot.
Why what worked five years ago doesn't anymore
Chlorine strips don't sell systems anymore.
Homeowners have seen TDS meters and red-dye tests for a decade. The shock is gone. They know it's a sales prop.
PFAS and microplastics are what they're actually scared of.
Every other headline is microplastics in blood, breast milk, arterial plaque. There has been no in-home test for it. Lab send-outs cost $300–800 and take weeks.
You need something they can see with their own eyes.
A PDF report is not a close. A glowing filter on their kitchen counter, from their own water, is.
Your old sales props vs. this one
What you carry into a home today, and where it falls short.
| Tool | What the customer sees | Shock value |
|---|---|---|
| Chlorine strip | Color change in a tube | Low — customer has seen it |
| TDS meter | A number on an LCD | Low — number means nothing to them |
| Hardness titration | Drop count to color | Medium — they already know they have hardness |
| Microplastics demo | Pink particles glowing on a filter | High — they've never seen this before |
The other three tools still belong in your bag — they qualify the install. But none of them shock the homeowner anymore. That's the gap this fills.
The math, honestly
Industry benchmark for residential filtration is roughly 10 sales calls per closed install. Average install ticket runs $4,000–$8,000. At pilot pricing, each microplastics demo costs you about $3–5 in consumables.
If a visible microplastics demo moves your close rate from 10% to 11%, the kit has paid for itself ten times over. We can't promise it will. We're running the pilot to find out — together, with full instrumentation.
The 15-minute call
Walk in. Start the test.
Fill 100 mL of the customer's tap water into a glass jar. Add one drop of Nile Red. Set a 15-minute timer. Total hands-on time: under 2 minutes.
Do your normal sales call.
Walk the property. Check the install location. Pitch the system. The chemistry runs while you do the work you'd already be doing.
Filter the sample at the table.
Push the stained sample through the 25mm filter with the included syringe. Takes about 30 seconds. The filter traps everything the dye attached to.
Hand them the blue light.
Under the included blue LED, microplastic particles glow bright pink against the filter. They see them. You don't have to convince them — they're holding the evidence.
Test again after install.
Same test on the filtered water. Side-by-side. The before/after is the close. It's also a referral asset — they'll show it to their neighbor.
Sample talk track
Steal these word-for-word until you find your own.
“Before we walk through the house, I want to start one test on your tap water. It takes 15 minutes — it'll be ready by the time we finish the walkthrough. Pour me a glass from the kitchen?”
“This is Nile Red — it's the same dye university labs use to detect microplastics. It only sticks to plastic. Not minerals, not salts, not bacteria — just plastic. Whatever lights up at the end is plastic in your water.”
“Let's see what we caught. I'm going to push the sample through this filter — anything bigger than a red blood cell stays behind. Then we shine the blue light.”
Don't oversell it. Hand them the dark box and the light. Let them look. Then: “That's your water. Those pink dots are particles of plastic that were floating in the glass you just poured. The system I'm proposing would catch all of them before they got to your tap.”
What's in the dealer kit
- Dark-box enclosure for clean reads in any lighting
- Blue LED (450nm) for fluorescence excitation
- Pre-dosed Nile Red vials — one per test
- 25mm nylon filters + Luer-lock syringes
- Phone app: photo upload → AI particle count → customer-facing report
- Co-branded leave-behind cards for the homeowner
- Salesperson training (30 min, recorded + live Q&A)
Built around the same Nile Red fluorescence protocol described in Leonard et al., 2022. We didn't invent the science — we packaged it for a sales call. See the methodology →
Bonus: geo-qualified leads, not just a sales tool
Every result you run — with the homeowner's consent — gets posted (geo-anonymized) to thewatermap.com, the public neighborhood microplastics map. The map ranks for “microplastics in [city]” queries. When a homeowner in your service area lands on it and wants a real install conversation, pilot dealers are the only ones we route them to.
Why “they see it themselves” closes
Every sales prop a homeowner has ever been shown is a number on a meter, a color on a strip, or a chart from a PDF. They've been desensitized. The objection is always some version of “how do I know that's real?”
Pink dots on a filter the homeowner just watched you make, from a glass of their own water, under a light they're holding — that objection doesn't exist. They walk you to the install location.
Microplastics have been found in human blood, arterial plaque, breast milk, and placenta. The headlines are doing the awareness work for you. Your job is to be the one who can show them.
Questions installers actually ask
How is this different from the at-home consumer kit you sell?
Same science (Nile Red fluorescence, Leonard et al. 2022), tuned for a 15-minute in-home demo. The consumer kit runs ~60 min with an H2O2 digestion step for cleaner background. The installer SKU skips digestion — residential tap water has near-zero organic load, so the trade-off is acceptable for a sales-call demo. Quantitative readout still works.
What does it cost?
Pilot pricing is intentionally simple: one-time kit hardware (dark box + light + syringe rig), plus per-test consumable refills in the $3–5 range. No per-seat fee, no monthly platform fee while we're piloting. We're still calibrating the rate card — the goal is for the math to work at your real conversion rate.
Will the readout work in a customer's kitchen with overhead lights on?
Yes — the kit ships with a dark enclosure (palm-sized) so ambient light doesn't matter. You drop the filter in, hit the blue LED, look through the orange-film viewport. The phone app captures the same view and runs the count.
What does the customer walk away with?
A photo of their filter under UV, a particle count, a tier comparison (where their home sits vs. the rest of the homes we've tested in their zip), and your company name on the report. Optional: their result goes on thewatermap.com — geo-anonymized — which feeds organic leads back into your service area.
Are you exclusive in my market?
We're only running pilots with two dealers right now. If you're a fit, you'll be one of them. Beyond pilot, we're planning a 'featured dealer in ZIP' tier on thewatermap.com — first-mover advantage is real.
How long is the pilot?
90 days. Weekly check-ins. We instrument everything (tests run, closes attributed, dealer-stated lift). At the end, you keep the kit at pilot pricing or walk away with no commitment.
What happens after you email us
We reply with the pilot terms one-pager and a 15-min Zoom calendar link to qualify fit.
Pilot kit ships with two starter packs (40 tests). 30-min recorded training + live Q&A with your sales team.
You run tests on real calls. We instrument: tests run, install attributed to demo, dealer-reported close-rate lift. Weekly 20-min check-in.
Renew at pilot pricing, move to standard rate card, or walk away. Either way you keep the data and the case-study rights.
Who this isn't for
Being honest about fit saves us both time.
- You only sell softeners — microplastics aren't the right wedge for hardness sales.
- Your sales motion is 100% inbound retail showroom — this is built for in-home calls.
- You need a lab-grade quantitative report for a commercial bid — that's the $800 FTIR test, not this.
- You want to private-label a kit with your own brand and walk away — we're keeping the science co-branded at “Powered by The Water Test” while the protocol is still maturing.
Straight talk: we're a small team running a tight pilot. The kit detects microplastic particles ≥10 µm — not nanoplastics, and not specific polymer ID (that's the $800 lab test). Results are for informational and sales-conversation use, not regulatory determinations. If that's a problem for your sales motion, we're probably not the right fit yet.