10 Things to Consider When Buying Test Kit Manufacturer

Lead-based paint in homes was outlawed in the United States in ; many homes built before then probably have some. Lead paint can gradually deteriorate into flakes, chips, and fine dust that’s easily inhaled or eaten by small children, even when it’s covered by many layers of unleaded paint. Lead poisoning has several effects, which can include brain damage and diminished mental and physical development.

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Lead can sicken people of any age, but young children are at greatest risk; hundreds of thousands of children in the U.S. have elevated levels in their blood, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. We hired a licensed lead inspector to scan for lead in three pre- homes owned by Consumer Reports staff members. The homeowners then used do-it-yourself lead test kits. Most of the kits quickly indicated whether lead was present.

The kits we tested detected lead levels as low as 2,000 parts per million (ppm) in our home-based tests. In our lab tests, some lead test kits detected lead at levels below 1,000 ppm. None of them falsely identified paint in a Consumer Reports lab painted in as having lead. Some kits can be a reasonable first step in detecting lead, as long as you follow instructions precisely.

All lead test kits require practice. Exposing the layers of old paint took strength, dexterity, and lots of practice. Home lead test kits use one of two chemicals to detect lead by color change. But correctly "reading" color changes when lead levels were low also took practice.

Which lead kit you should use depends on paint color. If you’re color-blind, don’t use a kit that turns pink or red. Also note that lead test kits use one of two chemicals—sodium sulfide or rhodizonate—to detect lead by color change. Consider buying one of each type to test paint of all colors. Here’s how to keep yourself and your family safe.

Start With a Blood Test
All children should be screened at ages 1 and 2, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Recent renovations or repairs to a building built before could disturb older paint and are more reason to test a child’s blood. Previously, a child was considered to have a blood lead level of concern if the test result was 10 micrograms per deciliter of blood or higher (mcg/dL). But in May , the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention changed its recommendation, establishing 5 mcg/dL as the new reference level to more accurately reflect evolving evidence of damage done by any childhood lead exposure. For more details, see CDC’s What Do Parents Need to Know to Protect Their Children?

Commending the CDC for making the change, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a statement noting that it affirmed what pediatricians have long recognized: "There is simply no safe level of lead exposure for children, " said AAP President Robert W. Block, MD.

Find the Lead
If a child tests negative for lead and you live in a house built before , you might still want to know whether any painted surfaces contain lead, as remodeling and even sanding could release it.

Rhodizonate-based lead kits can yield false positives on red or pink paint; sulfide-based kits can yield false negatives or positives on dark paint. For more reliable results, use one of each type of kit. Follow instructions and ensure that every layer of paint is exposed. Depending on the kit, you can test several areas for less than $100.

Your home might not be the only source of lead. Children can be exposed to lead if they attend day care in a pre- building. Toys can be another source, as we reported in New Worries Over Lead, for which we tested some lead kits on dishes, toys, and other household objects. Toys have lower lead limits than pre- house paint. Check the website of the Consumer Product Safety Commission for recalls.

Call a Pro for Prompt Action
If your child tests positive for lead, the quickest route to detection and stabilization is to find a certified lead inspector or risk assessor. Since , contractors renovating pre- buildings must have certification. Your regional EPA office has data on certified professionals; or you can find more information at epa.gov/lead/pubs/renovation.htm. Some homeowners are eligible for government-insured loans to help defray costs.

Another option is to hire a trained XRF (X-ray fluorescence) technician to screen for lead. Or you can send samples to a lab instead. If you choose to do that, be aware that the results are measured on a different scale: parts per million, not milligrams per square centimeter. An XRF gun isn’t the best choice for some surfaces. And if you get positive results, you should follow up with a lab test. XRF screening costs about $500 for an average home. Lab testing of paint chips can cost $85 per sample.

Since there is no safe level of lead exposure, Consumers Union, the advocacy arm of Consumer Reports, suggests that if your child and home test positive for lead and you’ve eliminated other sources, consider remediation.

This guide is for anyone who’s worried about the safety of the drinking water in their home.

Such concerns are justified. The lead crises in Flint, Michigan, and Newark, New Jersey, an alarming national water study in Canada, and the discovery of forever chemicals (PFAS) in nearly half of US drinking-water sources have all called into question the safety of North American public water supplies, which had long been considered among the best and most tightly regulated on earth. (In , the American Society of Civil Engineers named the US water supply one of the 10 “civil engineering achievements that had the greatest positive impact on life in the 20th century.”)

These crises have exposed some major vulnerabilities in our public water supply: aging infrastructure, imperfect public-safety practices, and a simple lack of knowledge about what’s actually in the water that flows from the nation’s faucets.

In the US, municipal water suppliers have to meet strict EPA limits some contaminants, including lead, mercury, pesticides, and industrial compounds. Every US municipal water supplier must share how well it measures up against the EPA standards in what’s known as a Consumer Confidence Report, or CCR, so checking your local CCR is a good first step toward knowing what might be in your water.

But water utilities are not required to test for every contaminant of concern. And as the Flint and Newark lead crises demonstrate, a CCR cannot account for problems that crop up downstream of testing stations. In both cities, changes to the water-treatment regimen at the plant caused previously stabilized lead (in the form of old lead pipes and lead-rich solder) to dissolve, creating dangerously high levels of lead in the water that flowed from residents’ taps. A home test is the best and often only way to know exactly what is in the water that comes out of your faucet.

And if you are among the roughly 43 million Americans who get their water from a private well, utility regulations do not apply. We recommend a test specifically for private well water below—it looks for contaminants that are of particular concern in well water, including bacteria and arsenic.

None of our recommended kits measure radon, a groundwater concern in some regions. If you use well water, the EPA recommends getting a radon test. If you’re on a municipal supply but still concerned about radon, call or visit the website of your supplier and request a Consumer Confidence Report (CCR) to see if it's been tested.

Home water quality test kits come in two distinct types. First, there are true DIY kits, which have you dip a series of color-changing paper strips into a sample of your tap water and compare the results against a standardized color chart. Second, there are send-away kits, which have you take water samples and ship them to a lab for detailed, direct measurement of the contaminants.

They have very different price tags: Send-away kits cost anywhere from $100 to $500 or more, depending on how comprehensive an analysis you decide to get. DIY kits start at about $20 (for basic, lead-only testing) and run up to roughly $50 for a kit capable of detecting 20 or so potential contaminants.

Both will tell you if you’ve got lead in your water—the ability to do so was one of our criteria. But a top-of-the-line send-away kit can detect 100 or more metals, industrial compounds, and farm chemicals.

For DIY kits, we looked at those that are widely available online and in hardware stores and that list the contaminants they test for individually (rather than in generalities, such as “tests for metals and pesticides”). Lead had to be among them. We cast a wider net, ultimately buying six different kits.

For the send-away kits, we again did our usual research, looking widely at what’s available and at comments from people who’ve purchased them, as well as learning more about how labs are certified to conduct water quality testing. The labs that sell our send-away test kits are certified by the federal or state EPA to conduct compliance testing on public water supplies. Many labs have additional national and international governing-body accreditations, such as the National Environmental Laboratory Accreditation Program (NELAP) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). We wound up with a final group of five contenders.

To reasonably compare the various kits, we needed a control. So we worked with Pace Analytical—a national water testing firm, whose credentials appear here—to do extensive testing and give us an independent measure of what was in the tap water at my apartment in Queens, New York.

For the test itself, I followed the kits’ instructions as well as general best practices for water sampling, like leaving my kitchen faucet off for 12 hours prior to the collection. (That ensures an accurate “worst case” reading of, in particular, metals like copper and lead, which can leach from pipes and concentrate in the stagnant water overnight). I removed the faucet’s aerator in order to minimize the amount of gases trapped in the sample, which can affect the readings. Finally, for consistency, I used a water cooler to collect a single large sample (approximately three gallons) of my tap water and drew from it for all five kits and the control tests.

If you want to learn more, please visit our website Test Kit Manufacturer(ja,th,tr).

Top pick

This send-away kit delivers lab-tested measurements of more than 100 contaminants, and it explains what they mean and what to do if there’s a problem.

The Tap Score Advanced City Water Test is our pick among all the test kits—both DIY and send-away—we looked at. It covers a range of 105 different contaminants, including lead, mercury, arsenic, and other metals; trihalomethanes (a wide class of industrial chemicals); pesticides; bacteria; and nitrates (from farm runoff). After using it twice—once at my apartment in Queens, New York, and later in my century-old home in New Jersey—I’m convinced it’s the most convenient, user-friendly way for homeowners to know for certain what’s in their tap water.

On the critical point of accuracy, Tap Score—and all the other send-away kits we tried—performed exceptionally well, closely mirroring the results we got from our control sample. But it completely outshone all of the rest in the way the results were reported.

Some send-away kits return a virtually indecipherable spreadsheet that simply lists which contaminants were detected and the EPA-designated maximum contaminant level (MCL), leaving you to try to make sense of what your results mean. Others do a bit better, color-coding the spreadsheet to make it easier to see where your readings indicate a potential problem. But Tap Score highlights areas of concern right up top, and it explains in plain language what your readings mean and what steps you might take to address anything problematic (for example, installing an under-sink filter or using a filter pitcher).

Take a look at three reports, from Tap Score, CityCheck, and Bang-for-the-Buck:

The differences are plain. Tap Score’s report gives you your actual readings, an explanation of what each individual reading means, and why it matters. CityCheck color-codes and uses symbols to indicate whether your readings are below or above federal guidelines or recommendations—which is helpful when you’re scanning the spreadsheet for things you might be concerned about, but not for interpreting those concerns. Bang-for-the-Buck just lists your sample’s readings and the EPA’s limits in a black-and-white chart. It’s barely readable and almost completely uninterpretable.

Tap Score also pulls out any readings of special concern and puts them front and center. My water in Queens, for example, registered an elevated (but nonetheless very low: 0. parts per million) level of bromodichloromethane:

That result accorded with the results from our other send-away test kits and our independent control test. But only Tap Score highlighted this result (instead of leaving me to find it in a spreadsheet). And only Tap Score offered any explanation of what bromodichloromethane is (a byproduct of disinfectants and of municipal water treatments); described its health risks (developmental defects, kidney and liver damage, nervous system problems); told me what level is considered risky (0.1 ppm, or 28 times my tap water’s level); and suggested how I might remove it from my tap water (use an activated carbon or reverse-osmosis filter).

Tap Score also showed slightly elevated levels of chloroform, copper, and iron in my water. The readings were all similar; none of them exceeded federal limits; and the latter two were readily explained: My apartment building was constructed in , and its iron and copper pipes have begun to corrode.

The readings on all the contaminants tested for, which in most cases showed “none detected,” were also similar to the control sample. That adds to our confidence that Tap Score is accurate.

Given the evidence that my Queens, New York, tap water is very clean, I actually stopped using a water filter after I got my Tap Score results. After all, it wasn’t really doing anything, since there wasn’t much of anything for it to do something about. When I retested the Advanced City kit in my 100-year-old New Jersey home in , it again revealed slightly elevated levels of a few substances, but nothing that prompted me to take action. Put another way, the test gave me a lot of peace of mind about the quality of the water coming out of those aging pipes—so I see no need to fuss about with a filter.

In addition to Tap Score’s accurate test results and useful analysis of them, we also admire its overall ease of use. Registering our tests was simple thanks to Tap Score’s clean, modern website. The instructions for how to take your samples, included with the kit, are well written and sensibly organized. And Tap Score includes a mailing label and box and utilizes multiple carriers (USPS by default; UPS and FedEx by request), which means you’re likely to be near a convenient drop-off. None of our competitors matched all—or, in some cases, any—of these helpful features.

A final feature that set Tap Score apart from the competition was its customer support. When you get your report (it’s sent as a Web page, downloadable as a PDF), there’s a live chat function that you can use to ask questions about your report directly. If the chat moderator can’t answer it—for example, if you have a technical question about treatment options or want to know details about a specific contaminant—your question is forwarded to one of SimpleLab's staff experts (they include a licensed professional engineer and a team of academic experts who specialize in water-quality issues). One of them will you an answer within a day or two.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

As a general rule with these kits, you’re buying directly from the manufacturer. That makes the transaction a little bit cumbersome. There is an option to order Tap Score on Amazon, but to get your report, you have to affirm to Amazon that it can share your with Tap Score. According to a company representative, about 15 percent of Amazon buyers either miss or ignore the confirmation request, meaning they cannot get their test results.

Best for...

Take a sample, send it in, and get clear results on per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances emerging in the US water supply—and in elevated levels at a New Jersey home we tested.

The Tap Score PFAS Water Test specifically looks for 14 different so-called forever chemicals, or PFAS, which are of increasing concern in the US water supply. It delivers the same ease of use, clear and actionable reports, and responsive customer service that make the Tap Score Advanced City Test our top pick. (The Advanced City test does not look for PFAS. And this test does not check for the chlorine, metals, and volatile organic compounds that the Advanced City test does.)

PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) are used in the manufacture of many common household goods, including nonstick cookware, water-resistant clothing, and stain-resistant upholstery. That means there are multiple well-documented sources of potential exposure. Such exposure has been linked with a host of health risks, including cancer, obesity, and weakened immune function.

Because PFAS do not break down over time, they can also accumulate in the environment and end up in drinking-water supplies. As a result, people and animals who use that water will be exposed to PFAS daily. Nearly half of US tap water—both from public utilities and from private wells—contains PFAS, according to a US Geological Survey study.

When I checked the water in my New Jersey home with the Tap Score PFAS test, it flagged two results with alerts. My PFOS measured 0. parts per billion, and my PFOA measured 0. parts per billion. In April the EPA set the enforcement limit for both compounds in drinking water at 4 parts per trillion, so my water effectively measured at or just above that level (3.87 and 6.1 ppt, respectively). One other PFAS, perfluorononanoic acid (PFNA), came in at 2.35 ppt—the EPA limit is 10 ppt—and the rest were below detectable limits. I’m comforted to know my water is not a major PFAS source, and I’m glad that I don’t have to pursue any remediation before I can enjoy a drink straight from the tap. (Full disclosure: I initially miscalculated, or, more accurately, I completely borked the math. I thought I was over the EPA limit by a factor of 1,000, and I was planning to install a whole-home or undersink PFAS filter.)

Though we think DIY lead tests are worthwhile, we didn’t like the more comprehensive (and more expensive) DIY kits that we tested, and we recommend against using any of them.

It’s not that they’re difficult to use. It’s that they’re almost impossible to read.

First of all, most of the readings are subjective: You have to try to match, by eye, the color of the various test strips to the printed charts that come with the kits. It’s rarely a black-and-white, positive-or-negative distinction; you’re instead judging your results against a subtle range of a single color. And outside conditions (like the quality of light in the room, or color blindness) can make the task even harder. I repeatedly found myself questioning my own eyes.

Second, the tests are rushed. A typical test strip might need to be swirled in water for 20 seconds, shaken off, and then read against the chart within another 30 seconds. That’s because the test reading (the color the test strip turned) continues to change after the strip is removed from the sample. Mess anything up, or get stuck on trying to decide which color best matches your results, and you’ve lost your chance of an accurate reading. And all of this is made much harder when, as is the case with some kits, you have multiple different tests on a single strip. (One such kit, the Med Lab 16 in 1, asks you to judge 16 different readings simultaneously.)

I tested six different DIY kits, taking (or, more precisely, attempting to judge) close to a hundred measurements. And when I finished, I was less confident that I knew what was in my water than I had been at the beginning.

A couple more points against the DIY kits: They don’t give you the actual contaminant levels in your tap water; all you get (if you trust your eyes) is a rough estimate of their concentration. And finally, even the best DIY kits are not very comprehensive. The most thorough one we found covers just 20 potential contaminants; send-away kits can detect and directly measure 100 or more, across a wider range of contaminant classes.

Again, we think DIY lead-test kits are an excellent value, and if lead is your only worry, they are a quick and inexpensive way to tell whether you have a problem. But if you want a broader analysis of what’s in your water, we strongly believe send-away lab tests provide value worth paying for.

Are you interested in learning more about Diagnostic And Therapeutic Equipment? Contact us today to secure an expert consultation!