Quick Answer: If this is your first real test of a well, or you're buying or treating one, send a sample to a certified lab. The Tap Score Advanced Home Water Test covers over 100 analytes, including E. coli and coliform bacteria. For yearly checks in between, a DIY kit with bacteria tests like the Varify 17-in-1 or the Safe Home 14-in-1 Ultimate, which adds an optional lab sample kit, does the job. Strip kits can't measure arsenic, uranium or most organic chemicals, so don't let them stand in for a lab test.
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When you're on a well, nobody is testing your water but you. City utilities run hundreds of tests a year and mail you a report. A private well gets tested when the owner decides to, and in a lot of homes that hasn't happened since the closing paperwork. The EPA recommends testing private wells every year for total coliform bacteria, nitrates, total dissolved solids and pH, and more often if something changes. (See the EPA's private well guidance.)
The right kit depends on why you're testing. Find your situation below.
In this guide
- Which kind of test do you need?
- How we chose what made the cut
- Tap Score Advanced Home Water Test Kit: best overall
- Safe Home 14-in-1 Ultimate Drinking Water Combo Test Kit: best DIY screen with a lab option
- Varify 17-in-1 Drinking Water Test Kit: best for repeat checks
- Watersafe Original Drinking Water Test Kit: best simple all-in-one
- Tap Score DIY Bacteria Water Test Kit: best after shock chlorination
- Collecting a sample that tells the truth
- How often to retest
- What to do with the numbers
Which kind of test do you need?
You just bought the house, or you've never had a full test → lab. You need a baseline: metals, minerals, bacteria, nitrate, and the things that strips can't see, like arsenic, uranium, VOCs and pesticides. This test also sizes your treatment. You can't pick a softener, iron filter or RO system responsibly without it.
You're about to buy water treatment equipment → lab. Hardness, iron, manganese, pH and TDS all change what you should buy and in what order. Getting it wrong is how people end up with a softener fouled by iron within a year. Our guide to the order of a well water treatment train explains why the numbers matter.
It's your annual check and last year's lab test was clean → DIY with bacteria. Bacteria and nitrate are the two that change fastest after heavy rain, flooding or nearby farming, and both have DIY options.
You just shock-chlorinated the well → bacteria test only. You want a clean coliform result before going back to drinking it. More below.
The water suddenly smells, looks or tastes different → lab. Something changed. Don't guess with strips. Why well water chemistry changes covers common causes.
How we chose what made the cut
We looked for kits that cover the problems wells actually have: bacteria first, then nitrate, hardness, iron, pH and lead. We gave lab kits credit for accredited labs and clear sampling instructions. We gave DIY kits credit for including real bacteria tests, not just strips. We read what each product says it measures and left out anything vague about which contaminants it actually detects. We haven't run these kits ourselves. Where a detail comes from the listing rather than published lab documentation, we say so.
Tap Score Advanced Home Water Test Kit: best overall
This is the one to get first. Tap Score's Advanced kit is a mail-in lab test for well or city water. You collect samples at a faucet using the materials and instructions in the box, then send them back with the prepaid return label. Tap Score says the test covers 116 analytes, including heavy metals such as arsenic, lead, manganese and uranium, plus nitrates, pH, hardness, alkalinity, disinfection byproducts and coliform and E. coli bacteria. Tap Score pitches it especially for wells near farming or industrial activity. Its lab network carries EPA, NELAC, ISO and state certifications.
What you get back isn't just a list of numbers. Tap Score reports results against health guidelines, which is useful when the report says "manganese 0.3 mg/L" and you have no idea whether that matters.
Who it's for: New well owners, home buyers, anyone about to spend real money on treatment.
Downsides: Shipping deadlines matter. Bacteria samples have short hold times, so don't collect on a Friday afternoon. Plan around the carrier schedule in the instructions. It's also more than most people need every single year. That's what the DIY kits below are for.
Tip: Your county or state health department may also run low-cost well testing through a certified lab. It's worth a phone call before you buy anything.
Safe Home 14-in-1 Ultimate Drinking Water Combo Test Kit: best DIY screen with a lab option
If you want a DIY screen between lab tests, this kit covers 14 parameters, including lead, bacteria, hardness, nitrates and pH, per the listing. The unusual part is the second kit in the same box: everything you need to collect a sample and send it to Safe Home's EPA-certified lab, with several paid testing packages to choose from. If a screen comes back worrying, you already have a path to a real number.
Who it's for: Well owners who've had a lab baseline and want a yearly, wide-net check, or renters on a well who want more than a bacteria test.
Be realistic: Screening tests flag problems; they don't measure them precisely. If anything comes up positive, especially lead, pesticides or mercury, confirm it with a certified lab before you act on it.
Varify 17-in-1 Drinking Water Test Kit: best for repeat checks
The Varify kit comes with 100 strips plus 2 bacteria tests. That's the part that makes it useful on a well. The strips cover 17 parameters, including lead, alkalinity, chlorine, hardness, iron, fluoride and copper. With that many strips you can test several taps, test before and after a softener, or re-test after a heavy rain without opening a new kit.
Who it's for: Routine yearly checks, and households that want to keep an eye on hardness and iron as well as bacteria. If you're running a softener, the hardness and iron pads give you a quick sense of whether the raw water has shifted.
The limitation: Strip hardness and iron readings are ranges. Fine for watching trends, not precise enough to program a softener. For that, use a titration hardness kit.
Watersafe Original Drinking Water Test Kit: best simple all-in-one
Watersafe sells this as its "Original" kit, and it keeps things simple. The listing says it checks for 9 key contaminants, including lead, bacteria, iron, copper, chlorine and nitrates, plus hardness and pH. Watersafe says its lead test detects down to 5 ppb, three times lower than the EPA's 15 ppb action level. That's a meaningful detail for older homes with brass fixtures or old solder, even on a well.
Who it's for: Someone who wants one box, a short instruction sheet, and answers to the big questions in an afternoon.
Who should skip it: If you need precise iron or manganese numbers to choose treatment, this isn't the right tool. Get the lab test.
Tap Score DIY Bacteria Water Test Kit: best after shock chlorination
Sometimes bacteria is the only question. After a flood, after work on the well or pump, or after you shock-chlorinate, you need to know whether coliform is gone before you drink the water again. A dedicated bacteria kit is cheaper and faster than repeating a full panel. Tap Score's DIY kit is built for coliform detection.
Timing matters: After shocking, flush until the chlorine smell is gone, wait the recommended time, then test. If you have a water softener, bypass it during shock chlorination. Shock chlorination and your water softener explains why and how.
Not for: Anything other than bacteria. And if you're fighting slime and orange staining, that's often iron bacteria, which a coliform test doesn't detect. Iron bacteria in well water covers that problem.
Collecting a sample that tells the truth
A good lab can't fix a bad sample. Most weird well test results come down to how the water was collected, not what's in the well. A few habits make a big difference:
- Pick the right tap. For a picture of the well itself, sample before any treatment: the pressure tank drain, a utility sink, or a spigot plumbed before the softener. For "what am I drinking," use the kitchen cold tap. Many people want both. Label them clearly.
- Never sample from a garden hose. Hoses grow bacteria and leach their own chemicals.
- Take off the aerator for bacteria samples. Aerators collect debris and biofilm that can cause a false positive.
- Run the water first (unless the instructions call for a "first draw" sample for lead). Several minutes clears what's been sitting in the pressure tank and pipes.
- Don't touch the inside of the cap or bottle. For bacteria, that one slip can ruin the result.
- Keep it cold and ship it fast. Bacteria samples have short hold times, often about a day. Read the lab's shipping window before you fill the bottle.
If a bacteria test comes back positive, re-sample before you panic. A positive confirmed on a second, carefully taken sample is the real signal to disinfect the well and look for how contamination is getting in, such as a damaged well cap, a cracked casing, or surface water pooling around the wellhead.
How often to retest
A reasonable rhythm for most well owners:
| When | What to test |
|---|---|
| Moving in, or never tested | Full lab panel |
| Every year | Bacteria and nitrate at minimum; a broad DIY kit is a bonus |
| Every 3–5 years | Repeat the full lab panel to catch slow changes |
| After flooding, well work, or a change in taste/smell/color | Bacteria right away, plus a lab panel if anything else changed |
| Pregnancy or an infant in the home | Nitrate and bacteria, and talk to your health department |
Hardness and iron can drift too, especially after drought or a new well pump. If your softener seems to run out sooner than it used to, retest the raw water before changing settings.
What to do with the numbers
Once you have a lab report, three numbers decide most of your water treatment:
- Hardness (gpg). Wells are often harder than city water because groundwater dissolves limestone and dolomite on its way to you. Why well water is hard explains the geology. Above roughly 7 gpg, most households start noticing scale.
- Iron and manganese. Even modest iron changes how you size a softener, and higher levels call for a dedicated iron filter ahead of it.
- pH. Low pH (acidic) water can corrode copper plumbing and may need a neutralizer, which usually goes before the softener.
Bacteria or nitrate over the limit is a separate, urgent problem. Stop drinking the water and get local health department advice before thinking about softeners at all.