How this site works, and how it pays for itself

What it is

An independent guide to private well water in Marion County, Florida. It exists because the search results for this subject are dominated by three things, and none of them is much use to somebody standing in a garage listening to a pump click: national cost calculators, extension articles written for Minnesota and Pennsylvania, and companies whose answer to every question is a system they sell.

Marion County is a specific place with specific geology, two water management districts and its own permitting offices. Almost nothing written for a general audience survives contact with that. So the whole editorial rule here is: if a national page already answers it correctly, leave it alone; if the local answer is different, write the local answer and cite where it came from.

What it is not

• Not a contractor. Nobody here drills, repairs, installs or tests anything.
• Not affiliated with any government office. The health department, the building department and the water management districts are named on this site because they are the correct people to call. None of them has endorsed or reviewed a word of it.
• Not a review site. There are no testimonials and no star ratings anywhere on this domain, because there is no service to review. Any that ever appeared would be invented, and invented ones are exactly the thing that makes the rest of this subject untrustworthy.
• Not a directory of paid listings. No company has paid to be mentioned or omitted.

How it is funded, in plain terms

The intention is that one Marion County contractor eventually sponsors the site and receives the enquiries it generates. That is the business model and there is no reason to be coy about it, because you can see the consequences of it more clearly if you know.

As of today no contractor has signed, and the site behaves accordingly. No page asks for a phone number or prints one to call, because there is nobody to pass a call or a number to. That is not a design choice that could be overridden by an enthusiastic marketing decision; it is wired into how the site is built. When there is no destination configured, the form does not exist in the page at all. No fields, no submit button, no collection of anything.

When that changes, three things change with it, and they will be visible:

1. A phone number and a short quote form will appear, and the form will say what happens to your details before you type anything.
2. This page will name the sponsoring contractor.
3. The enquiry will go to that one contractor. Not to a bidding pool, and not sold on to anybody else.

How the facts here are sourced

Every factual claim about permits, licensing, geology or water chemistry is attributed to a primary source and linked at the point it is used, so you can check it rather than trust it. The sources used across the site are the Florida Department of Health and its Marion County office, the Department of Environmental Protection, the St. Johns River and Southwest Florida water management districts, Marion County Building Safety, the USGS, and UF/IFAS extension material.

Where a claim is a reading of a published rule rather than a published answer, it is marked as unverified in a box on the page, and the phone number that would settle it is printed next to it. There is a live example of that on the water softener permit page.

Prices are the exception worth stating twice: every dollar figure on this site is a published range from elsewhere, not a local quote, and it is there so you can sanity-check a number somebody gives you. Nobody here has priced a job in this county.

Corrections

Rules change, offices move and readings turn out to be wrong. If something here is out of date or simply mistaken, particularly if you work in this trade or at one of the offices named, it is worth telling us and it will be changed.

The disclaimer, said once and meant

This is general information about how well systems and the local rules work. It is not an inspection of your well, not a diagnosis of your equipment, and not legal or regulatory advice about your property. Water that may be unsafe is a question for the health department and a certified laboratory, not for a website.