RainSoft Claims

      January 18th, 2010

I know they say a sales person will say anything to make a sale, but I heard some pretty lofty claims from the RainSoft sales rep.

I’ve been able to verify firsthand (unfortunately) that what he said about their installers was definitely not true.

Based on that, I’m assuming that much of what he said was, to put it plainly, bullshit. I’ve looked into some of these claims online, but have not yet found anything close to definitive.

Here are some of his claims:

• – Bill Gates uses a RainSoft system in his house.
• – Culligan of India uses RainSoft at their office.
• – Aquafina (owned by Pepsi) is filtered using RainSoft.
• – The White House uses RainSoft.
• – Home Depot picked RainSoft from over 600 other companies.

The lying sales rep made a bunch of other claims as well, but I can’t remember them all. Now, perhaps the above statements are true, but we’ve already been very underwhelmed with the system itself. As I previously wrote, the installer was completely incompetent, not the factory trained pro of which the sales rep assured me.

What makes this all the more upsetting is that Home Depot, what I consider a reputable company, has been silent. When I went to the Home Depot in search of a water softener, they offered me a free “water test”. This “water test” turned out to be a very long sales pitch in our home and a confirmation that our water is hard. (Duh.)

Aside from the $7,000 bill from Home Depot, they’ve been silent. I’ve been to the Home Depot three times since the disastrous install and they’ve simply washed their hands of responsibility. Bye bye Home Depot. There are plenty of other places to shop.

But I digress… Anyone know about the above claims?

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Filed under: Home Equipment

Fake RainSoft Letters

      January 15th, 2010

I guess this post falls under the category of “duh”, but I really would like anyone researching a RainSoft system to know that the RainSoft letters website is either entirely fake or massively censored. The local RainSoft dealer’s sales rep told me to check out the site when I was thinking about getting the system. He claimed the site was unfiltered. I mean, it’s obvious that this is not really going to be the case. It is, after all, a RainSoft site. The only company I’ve seen which has recently publicly denigrated itself is Domino’s Pizza, and even then, it’s because of a product relaunch.

I went through the process of filling out a letter form on the RainSoft letters site. I used no foul language, but did express how horrible the installation went and how disappointed we were. It’s a shame that I didn’t copy the letter, because I am sure it will never see the light of day on the RainSoft letters website. I used my real name and provided an email address. An email response would be nice, but I doubt I’ll get one.

I did a quick search of the site and found that they haven’t even included one slightly negative letter. When you think about it, this is kind of dumb. People are just not that gullible.

The water filtration business seems to be one of the least transparent out there. I just felt it was my responsibility to point out the obvious by stating the RainSoft letters site is fake and misleading.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention in my post that the phony letters are not just up on rainsoft-letters.com. Here, a partial list of sites where RainSoft is posting fake letters:

• letters.rainsoftofmaryland.com/
• letters.rainsoftofnewjersey.com/
• www.rainsoftnefl.com/customerreaction.asp

They have been posting stuff to blogs as well. When I have more information, I’ll update.

Filed under: Home Equipment, Marketing

Of Manuals and Misspellings

      January 9th, 2010

In my previous post, I briefly mentioned the nightmare resulting from having my local RainSoft dealer install a whole house filtration system. Now that the system is unfortunately a part of our house, I’m trying to work out the nuts and bolts as we slowly return to normalcy.

As such, I’ve looked at the slim Owner’s Manuals that came with the system. Here are some highlights:

On page 7 of the Owner’s Manual for the “TC-M Conditioner Series Water Treatment System” (Rev: A 06/09) we find,

“If water contains iron, manganese or hydrogen sulfide, a seperate iron removal system is suggested to be installed prior to the conditioner.”

Aside from the awful sentence structure, they misspelled the word, “separate”. This, my friends, is a word that a spell checker easily finds.

A couple paragraphs later on the same page, we have:

“Dain lines over 50 feet long, may need to be increased in size to allow the proper flow.”

That’s right, “Dain lines”. Again, not a word, and something a spell checker would easily find. The comma placement is also wrong.

Is this nitpicky? Perhaps. I don’t go looking for these things, but typically when you find mistakes in manuals they are ones which are not picked up by spell checkers. You know the company put extra minimal effort into a manual when they misspell words like “drain” and “separate”.

I have experience translating and proofreading manuals and, while tedious to write and correct, manuals are important. Many customers do actually read manuals and it reflects poorly on a product or service when the manual is half-assed.

I have not yet read all of the wonderful literature accompanying our new RainSoft system. I just hope they put more care into making their products than they do in their installations and manuals.

Filed under: Home Equipment, Stupidity