Bore & scheme water · est. 2012
Build the treatment train on this page: the vessels you actually need, how often the softener regenerates on your household, and what the lot costs installed. Including the days we tell you to install nothing.
$5,990 for the train drawn here — from $1,640 for UV on its own.
Installing since 2012. WaterMark-certified vessels and valves, fitted to AS/NZS 3500.1 by a licensed plumber. A written water report before we quote anything over $2,000.
The ColumnTick a stage and it appears on the line. The water changes colour where something actually takes the iron out — and what you are not buying stays drawn, empty.
$5,990 · regenerates every 6 days
320 mg/L in · 25 L resin · 4 in the house
Hardness gauge runs 0–400 mg/L; the mark is the NHMRC aesthetic guideline value, 200 mg/L — about scale, staining and taste, not a health limit.
More people don’t cost more to plumb — they just get you to the next regeneration sooner.
UV inactivates bacteria to the lamp’s rated dose. We don’t make health claims about your water — if you want to know what’s in your bore, get it lab-tested and we’ll read the report with you.
It writes the train, the hardness and the interval into the message box — you still put your own name on it.
What we install
Every figure below is supplied, installed and commissioned by a licensed plumber. Vessels and valves are WaterMark-certified. If your water doesn’t need one of these, we will say so before we quote it.
A 55 W chamber on the cold main with a sediment pre-filter, lamp change annually, sleeve cleaned at each service. It inactivates bacteria to the lamp’s rated dose and no further. We don’t make health claims about your water — if you want to know what’s in your bore, get it lab-tested and we’ll read the report with you.
Supplied, installed & commissionedfrom $1,640
Catalytic media vessel with an automatic backwash valve and a 20 µm sediment pre-filter in front of it. This is the one that stops the paving going orange and the laundry going rust-spotted.
Vessel, valve & pre-filter$2,450
Ion-exchange column and brine tank on a metered head. Right for households up to five people on a domestic bore — above that it regenerates too often to be the sensible size.
Column, head & brine tank$2,890
The bigger column, same head. Six people or more, or a hard bore with an evaporative unit on it. Roughly 14 kg of salt a regeneration at the moderate dose we set.
Column, head & brine tank$3,450
Set the vessels, pipe and valve them, program the head to your hardness and household, flush, test and hand you the settings written down. Charged once per job, whatever’s on the wall.
Per job$650
A new bypass loop so the house can run while the vessels are off line, or an under-eaves run when the treatment has to sit at the meter rather than where the water lands.
Bypass loop / meter run+$680 / +$1,150
Demo copy
Hardline is a fictional business, so these are written as demonstration copy — the kind of specific, unglamorous review a real bore-water customer leaves.
Our limestone paving had gone the colour of a brick and the reticulation was staining the render. They put the iron filter and a softener in over one day and programmed the head in front of me so I could see what it was doing. Two summers now and the paving has stayed the colour it was laid.
I rang up ready to spend six thousand dollars. He asked what the water tested at, I said I didn’t know, and he told me to spend ninety dollars on a lab test before I spent anything with him. Test came back and we only needed the UV. That’s the whole reason I’ve recommended them four times since.
The evaporative unit on the workshop was scaling shut every single summer and we were replacing pads twice a season. Softener went on the feed, and the pads have done two summers on the one set. They also showed us where the salt goes and how much, which nobody had bothered to do.
Where we work
Most of our work sits over the Gnangara groundwater system, where the superficial aquifer gives up iron and manganese to anyone who sinks a bore into it. We go as far south as Bayswater and Mount Claremont for whole-house jobs.
Before you spend anything
Send a sample to a NATA-accredited laboratory and ask for a domestic bore screen: total hardness as CaCO₃, iron, manganese, pH, total dissolved solids and turbidity. In Perth that is usually $90–$180 and takes about a week. Fill a clean bottle after running the bore for ten minutes, keep it cool, and get it to the lab the same day.
We don’t make health claims about your water — if you want to know what’s in your bore, get it lab-tested and we’ll read the report with you. We’re plumbers, not a laboratory.
Scheme water in the metro area runs around 60 mg/L total hardness and about 0.02 mg/L iron. The NHMRC Australian Drinking Water Guidelines aesthetic guideline values are 200 mg/L for hardness and 0.3 mg/L for iron — these are aesthetic values, about taste, staining and scale, not health limits. Scheme water sits well under both.
So a softener on scheme water is money you don’t need. If someone has quoted you six thousand dollars to soften Water Corp water, get a second opinion — ours is free and it will be “don’t”.
Hardness is dissolved calcium and magnesium, measured as milligrams per litre of calcium carbonate. At 320 mg/L — a typical Wanneroo domestic bore — soap stops lathering, the shower screen films over within days, kettles and hot water elements scale, and an evaporative air conditioner’s pads crust up over a season.
It is an aesthetic and appliance problem, not a health one. The ADWG aesthetic guideline value is 200 mg/L, and above about 500 mg/L people usually notice the taste.
The head counts litres and regenerates when the resin is spent. We size on 50 grams of hardness capacity per litre of resin — the moderate salt dose. A bigger salt dose buys more capacity and costs more salt; we set yours at the middle.
A 25 L column takes about 9 kg of salt a regeneration, a 40 L column about 14 kg. On the four-person, 320 mg/L bore drawn at the top of this page that is a regeneration every six days — roughly sixty a year, about 520 kg of salt. Bagged softener salt runs $18–$26 for 20 kg in Perth, so call it $470–$680 a year to run. That is not a small number and we would rather you saw it before you bought the column than after. The read-out at the top of this page gives your own interval.
A UV steriliser passes water through a quartz sleeve past a low-pressure mercury lamp. It inactivates bacteria to the lamp’s rated dose — and no further. It removes nothing: no iron, no hardness, no sediment, no chemistry. It needs clear water in front of it, which is why we always put a sediment pre-filter ahead of one, and the lamp is replaced annually whether it still glows or not.
We don’t make health claims about your water. A UV lamp is a piece of equipment with a rated dose, installed and tested to that rating. What that means for you is a conversation for you, your lab report and your doctor — not for a plumber’s website.
We are not a laboratory and we are not your GP. We don’t sell reverse osmosis for whole houses (it wastes water and it is the wrong tool for a bore), we don’t sell “conditioners” with no resin in them, and we don’t quote a softener without a hardness figure in writing.
What we do: plumb treatment, program it to your water and your household, service it, and read your lab report with you at the kitchen table before any of that happens.
Get a water plan
“The paving’s orange.” “The shower smells like a pond.” “The kettle’s furred up in a month.” Those three sentences tell us more than most quotes we get asked to match.
We’d call you back within one business day, and if you already have a lab report, send it — we will read it before we ring.
We’d call you back within one business day to talk through the water before anyone quotes anything. (This is a demonstration page, so nothing was actually sent.)
Hardline isn’t a real business — the page is. Every figure on it is computed live from a pricing model written down before a line of code, including the state most treatment sites would never build: the one where the honest answer is that you don’t need us. That’s exactly how we’d build yours.