About
About the Clean Water Ladies
Most water sites exist to make you afraid and then sell you the cure. This one was built to do the opposite: hand you enough real information that you can decide for yourself what your water actually needs — including, often, nothing at all.
There is no email gate here. No pop-up will chase you. Nothing is locked behind a “free report” that turns into a salesman’s phone call. You can read every word on this site without giving us anything, because the day you have to pay a toll to learn what’s in your own water is the day the whole thing stops being honest.
We teach instead of scare
The water-filter business runs on a simple trick: dip a meter, read a scary number, sell a system. The number is usually measuring the wrong thing — harmless dissolved minerals — while the things that genuinely matter stay invisible to the kitchen-counter theater entirely.
So we don’t rank contaminants by how frightening they sound. We treat them as peers and explain what each one actually does, how to tell whether you have it, and what genuinely removes it — and where a fix is just expensive theater, we say so. The goal is for you to understand your water before you spend a single dollar on it.
Who we are
We are three women with roughly sixty years between us in the biotech and pharmaceutical industry — more than forty of them spent filtering water and other fluids for work where “close enough” was never an acceptable answer: water clean enough to drink, and clean enough to manufacture and research the things that keep people alive.
Mary Jo is a PhD chemist who later moved into product management in the biopharmaceutical industry — equally fluent in the chemistry and in why a product does or doesn’t deliver what it promises.
Susan is a biochemist with fifteen years in technical support for companies making pharmaceuticals and bottled water — work that meant living in fluid dynamics, membrane chemistry, the full range of filtration methods, and analytical chemistry like HPLC and UPLC. In other words: telling people, all day, what a given filter can and can’t actually do.
Jane handles logistics, business support, and customer service — the reason the thing you ordered shows up, and the reason a real person answers when you reach out.
That background is the whole point. We spent our careers holding water to standards a household tap will never be measured against, which is exactly what makes us hard to oversell — and what lets us tell you, plainly, when someone is trying to oversell you.
Part of a bigger idea
Clean Water Ladies is the first branch of The DIY Ladies — our broader project built on one stubborn idea: that ordinary people can understand and handle far more of their own lives than they’re usually given credit for, especially the parts tangled up in sustainability and self-reliance. Water is where we started, because it’s what we know best.
Over time we expect to apply the same approach — teach first, sell nothing you don’t need, talk straight about what works — to other corners of living more self-sufficiently, whether you’re on a homestead or just a homeowner who’d rather know how things work. We’re not going to list a roadmap we’d only have to apologize for later. For now, the water is plenty.
Where the money comes from
We’ll be honest about this too, because incentives are where most “trusted advice” quietly goes wrong. Right now we sell nothing. Eventually we plan to offer systems, filters, and test kits — and even then, we’ll keep pointing you to the free options first: your city’s water report, a cheap strip test for the things a strip test genuinely answers, or a certified lab we earn nothing from when that’s what your situation actually calls for.
A site that will talk you out of a purchase is a site you can believe when it tells you to make one. That’s the trade we’re making on purpose.
You can actually reach us
Being reachable is, frankly, a competitive advantage — and a small company is one of the few left that can offer it. Most online businesses will never connect you to a person; the ones that do tend to route you to a script that exists to make you go away. We handle support ourselves, in house. If we grow enough to need help, we’ll hire it — but the goal stays the same: a real person who understands the chemistry on the other end.
And if the honest answer to your question is “that’s one for the manufacturer’s technical line” — we’ll tell you that, and point you straight to it, rather than guess.
What you can hold us to
- No gates, no pop-ups, no email required to read anything here.
- We’ll tell you when you don’t need to buy anything.
- We’ll name the fixes that are just theater.
- We’ll point you to free reports and certified labs we make no money from.
- A real person answers — and will route you to the right expert when that person isn’t us.
Ready to find out what’s actually in your water? Start with testing — no email required, naturally.