purgō · Latin · to cleanse
We build and fit home water treatment across New York City, Westchester, New Jersey and Connecticut. It starts with a free test of your actual tap — not an assumption about your zip code.
These are the patterns we see region to region. Your house is not a region — every job starts with a test at your own tap, and the results decide the build.
How a home gets treated
Most homes need one or two of these, not all three. We would rather sell you less equipment that solves the problem than more that sits in the basement.
Treated at the point where water enters the building, so every tap, shower and appliance downstream gets the same water.
A dedicated line under the kitchen sink for the water you cook with, drink and fill the kettle from.
The parts that guard the rest — sediment pre-filters, UV, leak shutoff, and weather protection for outdoor equipment.
The short version
Two points of treatment. One where water enters the house and everything downstream benefits, one at the kitchen sink for what you drink.
The part most companies outsource
A water system is only as good as the plumbing it is tied into. That is why we do not hand your job to whichever contractor is free that week. Purgō technicians are hired by us, trained in our own shop, licensed in the state they are working in, and they are the same people who come back if something needs attention in year six.
It means we can stand behind the whole job — the equipment, the tie-in, the drain, the bypass, and the way the basement looks when we leave.
Install day, plainly
A technician comes out, tests at the tap, looks at your main, your heater and your available space. No charge, no obligation.
One page: what we found, what we recommend, what it costs installed, and what it costs to run each year.
Municipal requirements differ across four states. Handling that is our job, not yours.
Drop cloths down, water off, tie-in made, drain routed, valve programmed, everything pressure-tested before we leave.
Fifteen minutes at the end so you know the bypass, the salt fill and the filter schedule. Then we check in at the six-month mark.
Our most-installed build
The combination that solves the most for the most homes: softening, carbon filtration and sediment protection on the main, with reverse osmosis at the kitchen sink.
Why homeowners pick us
NSF-certified resin, carbon and gravel. Pressure-tested before it leaves the shop.
We employ and train our own installers. No rotating cast of subcontractors.
Equipment and labour both covered, serviced by the same team that fitted it.
Installed price on the quote, including permits and tie-in. No surprises on the day.
Where we work
A brownstone in Brooklyn and a farmhouse in Litchfield County have almost nothing in common below the floorboards. We build for both.
Manhattan · Brooklyn · Queens · The Bronx · Staten Island
Soft reservoir water, chlorinated. Issues come from old mains, risers and rooftop tanks.
Yonkers · New Rochelle · White Plains · Scarsdale · Rye · Bedford · Katonah · Somers
Aqueduct water in the south, private bedrock wells further north. Test first, always.
Bergen · Hudson · Essex · Passaic · Union · Morris · Middlesex · Monmouth
Moderate to hard, chlorine or chloramine. We read your utility's report before quoting.
Fairfield · Greenwich · Stamford · Norwalk · Danbury · New Haven · Litchfield
Heavy private-well territory. Hardness, iron, manganese and sulfur are the usual suspects.
Before you call
A filter removes things from the water — chlorine, sediment, taste, odor, certain contaminants. A softener removes hardness, meaning the dissolved calcium and magnesium that leave scale on your kettle, cloud your shower door and shorten the life of a water heater. They solve different problems, which is why many homes end up with both and some need only one.
Usually not. City water arrives genuinely soft, so softening rarely earns its keep in the five boroughs. What city homes do benefit from is carbon and sediment filtration for chlorine and for whatever the building's own pipes contribute, plus reverse osmosis at the kitchen sink in older buildings. We will tell you if you don't need something.
Water is pushed under pressure through a membrane with pores fine enough that dissolved contaminants cannot follow it through. What comes out the other side is stripped of the great majority of what was dissolved in it. It is the most thorough treatment available at a residential scale, which is why we use it for drinking and cooking water rather than for the whole house.
Sized correctly, no — you should not notice a difference at the shower. Sizing is the whole game here: a system matched to a two-bathroom house will choke a five-bathroom one. That is part of what the on-site visit is for, since we need to see your service line and your fixture count, not just your square footage.
It depends on the stage and on how hard your water works it. Sediment pre-filters typically run six to twelve months, RO membranes considerably longer, and whole-home carbon beds are measured in years. We leave you a schedule for your specific build and we send a reminder when yours is due.
Often yes for under-sink drinking water systems, which is the most common request in the city. Whole-home equipment in a multi-family building depends on where your service enters and what your building allows, so that conversation usually involves your managing agent. We are happy to talk to them.
A technician comes to the house, draws a sample at the tap, and runs the standard panel on the spot — hardness, chlorine, TDS, pH, iron. For private wells we also pull a sample for a certified lab, since bacteria, nitrate and arsenic need proper analysis. You get the numbers whether or not you buy anything from us.
No charge, no obligation
Book a visit and we'll test at your tap, walk your basement, and tell you plainly what — if anything — is worth doing.
Home / Whole Home Systems
Treatment fitted where water enters the building, so every tap, shower, dishwasher and boiler downstream is working with the same water. Which of these you need depends entirely on what your test comes back saying.
Point-of-entry treatment
We would rather explain why you do not need something than sell it to you. Every one of these starts with a test, and plenty of visits end with us recommending the smallest option on the page.
Softening + carbon
The workhorse of the range, and the right answer for most hard-water homes on a municipal supply. It handles the two problems that usually arrive together: dissolved calcium and magnesium that leave scale everywhere, and the chlorine that makes water taste and smell like a swimming pool.
Downstream, soap starts lathering properly, the shower door stops fogging with mineral film, and your water heater stops working through a layer of scale to do its job.
Filtration only
For homes that do not have a hardness problem — most of New York City, for instance — but do want the chlorine, taste, odor and sediment dealt with before water reaches a single fixture.
No salt, no drain line, no regeneration cycle. Once it is in, it does its work quietly and you top up nothing.
Hardness only
Straight softening for homes where hardness is the whole story. Calcium and magnesium are exchanged out before the water reaches your plumbing, which is the difference between a heater that lasts its rated life and one that dies early packed with scale.
You will notice it first in the laundry and the bathroom — towels come out softer, and the ring around the tub stops coming back.
Salt-free
An alternative for households that want scale under control without adding sodium to the water, without a drain line, and without carrying salt down the basement stairs.
Rather than removing minerals, it changes their structure so they are far less inclined to stick to pipe walls, heating elements and fixtures. The minerals stay in your water; the scale largely does not.
Well water
Private wells across Connecticut and northern Westchester rarely present one problem at a time. Sediment, iron, manganese and sulfur odor tend to arrive together, and a single tank cannot properly address all of them.
This build treats in stages, so each tank does one job well instead of one tank doing several jobs badly. It is what we fit on the majority of well homes.
City water
The same staged approach applied to a municipal supply, for larger homes and for districts where chlorine or chloramine levels make a single tank work too hard.
Both tanks backflush, which keeps the media beds from channelling and keeps the system performing the way it did in month one.
Iron & sulfur
For the two problems that make well water genuinely unpleasant: orange staining on fixtures and laundry, and the rotten-egg smell of hydrogen sulfide.
Both are handled by oxidising the dissolved contaminants into particles large enough to be filtered out. What reaches your taps afterwards is clear and does not announce itself.
That is exactly what the free visit is for. We test, we look at your setup, and we tell you which one fits.
Home / Drinking Water Systems
Whole-home treatment handles the water you wash in. This handles the water you actually drink — a dedicated, thoroughly filtered line at the kitchen sink.
Point-of-use treatment
Reverse osmosis is the most thorough treatment available at residential scale. It is also slow and produces some waste water, which is why it belongs at one sink rather than across a whole house.
Tankless RO
Our most-installed drinking water system. Tankless reverse osmosis running at up to 800 gallons per day, which in practice means it keeps up with a full pitcher and a pot of pasta without the pause a tank system gives you.
Because there is no storage tank, it takes back a good deal of the cupboard under your sink, and there is no standing water sitting in a bladder between uses.
Classic RO
The proven tank-style design, and still the right answer when budget matters more than cupboard space. Five stages of filtration feed a storage tank, so purified water is waiting whenever you open the tap.
Simple, well understood, and easy to service — there is a reason this configuration has been in kitchens for decades.
Optional stage
Reverse osmosis is thorough by design, which means it takes out beneficial minerals along with everything else. Some people notice; the water can taste a little flat and slightly acidic.
An inline remineralisation stage puts calcium and magnesium back after filtration, which lifts the pH gently and restores the rounder taste most people prefer. It is a small addition and easy to retrofit later if you decide you want it.
Finishes
The faucet is the only part of the system you will ever look at, so it should match the rest of the kitchen rather than announce that something technical happened under the counter.
Five finishes, all lead-free and all included in the installed price — brushed nickel, polished chrome, brushed gold, matte black and oil-rubbed bronze.
Worth knowing
Dissolved solids that other filters pass straight through — lead, nitrate, fluoride, chlorine byproducts, PFAS compounds and a wide range of other contaminants. It is the reason RO is the standard for drinking water rather than a carbon block alone.
Filters once or twice a year, a membrane far less often, and a modest amount of waste water per gallon produced. We put the annual running cost in writing on your quote so it is never a surprise.
An RO system is not a disinfection unit. It should not be used on water that is microbiologically unsafe or of unknown source without proper disinfection ahead of it — which, on a private well, means UV.
Most drinking water systems go in inside a couple of hours. We can usually test and quote on the same visit.
Home / Add-ons & Protection
The pieces that protect everything else. None of these are required on every job — we fit them when the water, the house or the winter calls for it.
Supporting equipment
A sediment filter costs very little and saves an expensive tank. A leak valve costs a fraction of a flooded basement. These are the additions we actually recommend, and we will say when one is unnecessary.
Disinfection
Filtration removes things. UV neutralises living things — bacteria and other microorganisms — using light alone, with nothing added to the water.
On a private well there is no utility chlorinating your supply, so this is the layer that provides that protection. We fit it as standard on well builds and it is worth considering anywhere a supply is untreated.
First stage
The cheapest piece of equipment in the house and one of the most useful. It catches sand, grit, rust and scale flakes before they reach anything expensive.
In New York City that matters more than people expect — a century of cast iron mains sheds a surprising amount of material, and it is the reason a filter cartridge pulled from a Brooklyn basement often comes out orange.
Protection
A valve on the main that watches flow and closes it when the pattern looks wrong — a burst supply line, a failed heater, a pipe that let go while you were away for the weekend.
Water damage is the most expensive thing that can go wrong in a basement. Given how far that repair bill runs, this is the least glamorous and most sensible add-on we sell.
Enclosures
Not every house has basement room, and in this part of the country equipment left outside has to survive real winters.
An insulated shed or a hollow faux rock keeps the tanks out of the weather and out of sight, while leaving proper access for servicing. The rock disappears into planting; the shed suits a side yard or a utility run.
We service and extend existing setups too, including equipment we did not originally install.
Home / Installation
Trained in our shop, licensed in your state, on our payroll — and the same crew that comes back years later. Here is exactly what happens between your first call and our six-month check-in.
The difference we care about most
Plenty of water treatment companies are sales operations with a call list. They quote the job, take the deposit, and hand the actual work to whichever plumbing contractor is available that week — someone who has never seen the equipment before and will never see your house again.
We do it the other way round. Every Purgō technician is on our payroll, trained on our bench, licensed in the state they are working in, and accountable for the job long after the van pulls away.
It costs us more. It is also the only way to promise that the tie-in, the drain, the bypass and the programming are done the same way every time.
New technicians ride along on installs before they lead one. Nobody works alone in a customer's home until they have earned it.
Start to finish
From the first phone call to the check-in six months later. Most jobs run about a week end to end, with one day of that spent in your house.
Ten minutes on the phone. Where you are, what you have noticed — the smell, the staining, the scale, the taste — and whether you are on a municipal supply or a private well. We book the visit from there.
A technician tests at your tap for hardness, chlorine, total dissolved solids, pH and iron. On a well we also draw a sample for a certified lab, because bacteria, nitrate and arsenic need real analysis rather than a field kit. You get the numbers either way, and there is no charge and no obligation.
We look at where your water comes in, what your heater is doing, where a drain could be routed, and how much room there actually is. This is the step that decides whether a system fits and how it gets tied in — and it is the step that cannot be done over the phone.
One page. What we found, what we recommend and why, the installed price including permits, and what it costs to run each year. If we think you need less than you expected, that is what the page will say.
Requirements differ across four states and hundreds of municipalities. We handle the filing where it is required and we book a date that works for you rather than a four-hour window.
Drop cloths down before anything else. Water off, equipment set, tie-in made, drain routed, bypass fitted so the house can run without the system if it ever needs to. Everything is pressure-tested and the valve is programmed to your household's actual usage before we pack up.
Fifteen minutes with you at the end: how the bypass works, how to add salt if your build uses it, when filters are due, and what the display is telling you. We leave the manuals and our direct number, and we clean up.
We come back, retest your water, confirm the system is doing what we said it would, and change anything that is due. Same technician wherever we can manage it.
Fair warning
If you are in the five boroughs, your water is already soft and a softener will do very little for you. We will say so on the visit rather than after the deposit clears.
If your main is failing or your shutoff will not hold, that gets fixed before treatment goes in. Occasionally that means we send you elsewhere for a week. It is still the right order to do things in.
Every system has a running cost. Ours is on the quote in writing, so the number you agree to in month one is the number you are still living with in year four.
The visit is free and it takes about forty-five minutes. You will have real numbers by the time we leave.
Home / Service Areas
New York City, Westchester, New Jersey and Connecticut. Below is what we typically find in each — and why we still test your own tap before quoting anything.
Coverage
We work across the whole New York metropolitan region. What follows is what we generally encounter in each area — useful for setting expectations, but never a substitute for testing your own supply.
New York City
Where the water comes from. Unfiltered surface water from the Catskill, Delaware and Croton reservoir systems — among the better municipal supplies in the country, and genuinely soft when it leaves the reservoir.
What we usually find.
How we usually build. Whole-home carbon and sediment filtration for what the building adds, plus reverse osmosis at the kitchen sink in older stock. Co-op and condo work is common for us; we are used to dealing with managing agents.
Every quote in this region still starts with a test at your own tap. Two houses on the same street can read differently, and we have stopped being surprised by it.
Westchester County
Where the water comes from. The southern half largely drinks the same soft aqueduct water as the city. North and east of White Plains, homes increasingly draw from local reservoirs or private bedrock wells.
What we usually find.
How we usually build. South county tends to look like a city build. North county usually needs a full lab panel first, then a softener with iron removal and UV. We will not quote north Westchester without testing.
Every quote in this region still starts with a test at your own tap. Two houses on the same street can read differently, and we have stopped being surprised by it.
New Jersey
Where the water comes from. A patchwork of surface reservoirs and groundwater aquifers, with the serving utility changing from town to town — sometimes from one side of a road to the other.
What we usually find.
How we usually build. Softening plus carbon as the base build, with reverse osmosis for drinking water. We pull your utility's current water quality report before quoting so the recommendation matches your actual district.
Every quote in this region still starts with a test at your own tap. Two houses on the same street can read differently, and we have stopped being surprised by it.
Connecticut
Where the water comes from. A large share of Connecticut homes are on private bedrock wells, which means nobody is treating anything before it reaches your house.
What we usually find.
How we usually build. Almost always a dual-tank build: softening plus iron and sulfur removal, with UV for bacterial protection. Always after a certified lab panel, never from a field kit alone.
Every quote in this region still starts with a test at your own tap. Two houses on the same street can read differently, and we have stopped being surprised by it.
Not on the list?
These are the counties we cover routinely. We travel further for larger jobs and for well systems, and if we genuinely cannot help we will tell you who can.
Case by case — call and we will tell you honestly whether the trip makes sense for your job.
Covered for whole-home and well systems.
Covered, particularly for private well builds.
Restaurants, salons, laundries and multi-family buildings across all four states.
Book a free on-site test and we will give you the numbers for your house, not the average for your county.
Home / Our Story
We spent years in other people's basements looking at good equipment fitted badly. Purgō exists because the person who sells you a system should be answerable for how it goes in.
purgō · Latin · to cleanse, to make clear
Purgō started the way most trades businesses do — with people who had already spent years in other homes' basements, looking at equipment that had been sold well and fitted badly.
The pattern was hard to miss. Systems oversized for the house. Softeners installed in the five boroughs, where the water was already soft. Drain lines run without an air gap. Media beds that had never been changed because nobody left the homeowner a schedule. In almost every case the equipment itself was fine. The problem was that whoever sold it was not the person who fitted it, and neither of them was ever coming back.
So we built the company around the part everyone else treats as an afterthought: the install, and the years after it.
What we hold to
Why this region is hard
Most water treatment companies operate somewhere with one aquifer and one answer. Ours has four states, hundreds of utilities and tens of thousands of private wells inside a ninety-minute drive.
Excellent soft reservoir water arriving through mains laid before the First World War, into a building whose own pipes may predate the 1987 solder rules. The water is not the problem. The last hundred feet is.
Moderately hard groundwater from a utility that serves four towns and changes character across them, with PFAS on the state's radar and scale on every kettle in the street.
A bedrock well nobody is treating, running hard, carrying iron, and occasionally announcing itself with sulfur. Two of these on the same road can test completely differently.
Same company, same technicians, three entirely different builds. That is the job, and it is the reason we test first and talk second.
Plainly
You will not get a demonstration involving electrodes and a beaker of brown water on your kitchen counter. That test measures dissolved solids, not danger, and it is theatre. We hand you a lab panel instead.
You buy a system, you own it. Filters and salt are consumables with a published cost, and you can buy them from us or from anyone else. Nothing stops working if you stop paying us.
Free, on-site, about forty-five minutes, and you keep the numbers whatever you decide.
Home / Contact
Free, on site, about forty-five minutes. You get real numbers for your own tap and a written recommendation — whether or not you buy anything from us.
Email us
The more you can tell us up front, the more useful the visit is. If you already have a water quality report or a lab panel, mention it — we will read it before we come out.
About forty-five minutes. A technician tests at your tap for hardness, chlorine, total dissolved solids, pH and iron, looks at your service entry and your heater, and talks through what your options actually are.
On a private well we also draw a sample for a certified lab. Results usually come back within a week.
There is no charge for any of this, and no obligation to buy anything. If the honest answer is that your water is fine, that is the answer you will get.
All five boroughs of New York City · Westchester County · northern and central New Jersey · Fairfield, New Haven and Litchfield counties, Connecticut.
Full coverage details →