Northern Illinois Waterworks

I go in for their 5-gallon jugs because their water is so delicious and refreshing. Very clean, crisp water. I definitely recommend their services.

Jim was right on time, very professional, courteous, clean and explained the system to me very well (as I have never owned a water softener before). The system should be self-suffient now with proper maintenance by me, but if anything ever happens, I will call Waterworks again.

We moved into our 18 year old home in 2005. The water seemed pretty good, however, the previous owners were renting a water filtration system from Culligan and we wanted our own filtration system. I had George come out and test the water and suggest a new system. He said we had high iron and recommended a maintenance free system called the Iron Curtain. We had him install this system for around $2500. He said that we could get away with having to do a chlorine and quot;shockand quot; treatment to the system about once a month to clean out the bacteria in the Iron Curtain instead of installing an expensive chemical pump. Weeks later George contacted us and told us that we would need a chemical pump to inject smaller doses of chlorine at backwash time instead of this once a month large chlorination treatment because he was told that the filter media would degrade over time. He wanted $500 to install this pump but I balked at that because the reason why we committed to this system in the first place was because he said we didn't need an expensive chemical pump. Unfortunately for us he gave us wrong information. When we refused to pay he threatened to remove the system completely. Having already paid into the system we settled on a $300 price. I also mentioned to him that he originally installed the backwash tube incorrectly. He put this one inch backwash tube into a 2 inch PVC drain that was being used by my water softener. The problem was that this 2 inch PVC drain condensed into a 1 inch drain at the bottom and could not keep up with the amount of water being pumped out of the Iron Curtain. Every time during a backwash cycle the water would over flow onto my basement floor. It was a while before I noticed it because it's hidden in the back of everything and thankfully due to a crack in my foundation the water was draining under the foundation and not causing a flood in my basement. I showed him his mistake and told him that he needed to extend the tube and go directly into my basement drain. He said he didn't have that tubing with him, which I thought was odd as it's standard tubing and that he would be back to install it correctly. He never came back to correct his mistake. Needless to say ever since we switched to this Iron Curtain system the water has never been the same. It had various bad smells and tasted worse. I contacted George again and explained the situation. He gave me some steps to take which included shocking the well and chlorinating our pipes but the results were only a temporary solution. Within a week the water was back to bad. I couldn't get lazy George to come back out and investigate. I even called the manufacture of this system and they provided little help in solving our water problem. They only confirmed that the Iron Curtain was indeed taking out the iron from the water. About a year later Northern Illinois Waterworks had the nerve to contact me and inform me that it was time for my 360 day maintenance of my chemical pump. I told them that if George would finally come out and fix our original water problem that he had previously failed to do including his botched installation I would consider them for this yearly maintenance, otherwise, I wasn't interested. I never heard from them again. I finally came to the realization that George was only interested in revenue generating expensive systems and maintenance schedules NOT in solving your water problems or correcting his own mistakes. It is now 2011 and our water has rarely been good. The only time when it is good is when we shock the well with Chlorine. The water is good for about a week then everything goes back down hill again thus always suspecting major bacteria was in the water. Most recently we are getting iron stains on everything including our clothes. Come to find out the media in this system needs replacing every 5 years or so at a cost of around $800 - something George failed to tell us about this so called maintenance free system. After all these years we finally called another company to look at our water. After testing the water they told us that George should have never installed this Iron Curtain system as we have bad iron bacteria in our water. What we need is a chlorination system to deal with this problem. I felt relieved as we finally got some competent help with this problem with someone who knows something about water. In the end the additional chlorination equipment, carbon filter and a different media replacement for the iron curtain that can handle chlorine cost me another $2600. I would stay far far away from this incompetent George as he has demonstrated that he has no interest in solving your water problems only in incorrectly installing wrong, expensive equipment and scheduling lucrative maintenance calls.

Update: I ended up installing this new equipment myself including all the additional plumbing that needed to be done including new drainage pipes that should have been done by lazy George but wasn't. It has been about 2 months since I have revamped my entire water system. The water couldn't be better. No smell, no bad taste and crystal clear water in the bathtub instead of this green color. I couldn't be happier. It took someone who knew nothing about water to educate himself to fix a problem that a so called water professional horribly failed to do.

Contacted Northern Illinois Water Works because my rental softener installed by another company in town wasn't really meeting my water treatment needs. My water smelled of sulphur and tasted very bad. They recommended a Hellenbrand Promate 6.0-DMT which is a carbon filter and softener in one unit. They were very accomodating with my schedule and did the installation after 5:00P for no extra charge so that I would not have to take time off from work. The installer was very professional and detail oriented. He even took the old softener with him to return it for me. I'm very pleased with the system, I can actually drink the water right from the tap now! No more having to buy bottled water.