Aqua Clear Water Systems, LLC

Jonathan Garvey no longer has to worry that his efforts to employ an eco-friendly water softener will leave him getting soaked.

After an assist from SOS, the 28-year-old Madison man will get back the $800 he spent on a “no-salt water softener alternative” that, for Garvey, has been an alternative only to scale-free faucet heads and dishes.

It’s disappointing to try to do something green, he said, “and then you get nothing.”

Garvey moved into his South Side Madison home in August 2007. It didn’t have a water softener and – conscious of how much water traditional softeners use – Garvey thought he’d look for an environmentally sensitive way to treat his hard water.

Searching the Web he found a Greenfield, Ind.-based company called Freije that advertised a system that used “electronic frequencies” – transmitted through a coil on the home’s main water line – to change the way minerals act in hard water. The results, according to the company, are pipes free of scale build-up and water that comes with many of the other benefits of traditionally softened water.

Before you scream “buyer beware,” consider this: Freije offers free shipping, a 90-day money back guarantee and a three-year warranty on its residential system, which it began selling in 2001. It also lists companies including McDonalds and Wal-Mart that it says are successfully using the commercial version of the product.

In short, Garvey thought he was pretty safe, and he installed Freije’s standard home system in January 2008.

Two months later, he told the company there was no change in his water, and they sent him a free replacement on the assumption that the first was damaged. It did no good either, he said.

Most recently, the company sent him a third, more powerful unit, also free of charge, that Garvey said also did not work.

Early this month, he again asked for a refund. The company declined. Garvey contacted SOS on April 9 and on Thursday Freije Director of Marketing Julie Cooley said “I do believe he is entitled to his money back. Cooley explained that Garvey first asked to return the initial system within 90 days of getting it and was “not adequately educated (by Freije) as to what our system does and what it does not do.”

Cooley maintained that the system works, and pointed to the company’s 23-year history and success in treating water in industrial and commercial settings. But she acknowledged, “there’s never been an academic study of our product.”

Garvey said he’s ready to embrace salt.

 Artical by: madison.com

LOS ANGELES — Rural residents who drink water from private wells are “much more likely” to have Parkinson’s disease, a finding that bolsters theories that farm pesticides may be partially to blame, according to new research from a University of California at Los Angeles-led team of scientists, an August 5 Environmental Health News (EHN) article said.

Over the past few years, a growing body of evidence has led experts to suspect that agricultural pesticides can attack developing brains, perhaps in the womb or infancy, leading to Parkinson’s disease later in life. Many insecticides widely used on farms are potent neurotoxins, and lab animals exposed to mixes of them develop Parkinson’s symptoms.

Also, several previous studies of farmers and rural residents have reported a link.

The new study of more than 700 people in California’s Central Valley found that those who likely consumed contaminated private well water had a higher rate of Parkinson’s. The risk was around 90 percent higher for those whose drinking water came from private wells near fields sprayed with the widely used insecticides propargite or chlorpyrifos.

People with Parkinson’s “were more likely to have consumed private well water, and had consumed it on average 4.3 years longer” than those who did not have the disease, said the scientists. They were led by UCLA epidemiology professor Beate Ritz, and their study published online last week in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.

To read the full EHN article, click here.

Article From: http://www.watertechonline.com