The Price Was the Last Thing We Worked Out. And We Only Ever Send Three Options.

A client asked us for a price list last month. Not a quotation — a price list, so he could pick a filter off it the way you pick a pump off a catalogue. We do have prices. I still could not answer him, because on a water treatment job the price is the last thing we work out, and the four things we work out before it are what decide whether the price means anything at all.

This is the order we follow, in the order we follow it. It is written down now, which it was not two years ago, and the writing down is half the story. It sits beside what we have already published about how we quote on the wastewater side — the length of a quotation matching the value of the job, and the structure we use when somebody sends us a finished design. Those are about the document. This one is about the sequence that produces it, and about why the document that arrives carries three options and not eight.

First the process flow, not the product

The first thing we draw is not a filter. It is the water: where it comes into the site, which tank it lands in, what pushes it out of that tank, and which fixtures it reaches. A deep well into a ground cistern, then a pump to a roof tank, then gravity down to the rooms, is a different job from a district connection straight into a pressurised line, even if the water is identical and the building is the same size.

A filter is a thing you put inside a line. Until the line is drawn, the filter is a guess. I have been handed enough drawings where somebody put a vessel on the wrong side of the pump to treat that as the normal failure rather than the unusual one. It is the same instinct that makes us draw the whole plant before specifying anything in it on the wastewater side.

Then the pump, because the pump sizes the vessel

The second number we want is the flow rate the pump actually delivers. Not the building's consumption for the day — the rate, in the moment, through that pipe.

These are two different numbers and people hand us the wrong one constantly, usually because the daily figure is the one that appears on a bill and the rate is the one nobody has written down. A vessel chosen against a daily volume and then installed on a line moving faster than the media can work will pass water it has not finished treating, and it will do that quietly. Nothing breaks. The water just is not treated, and the first evidence is a complaint months later.

The arithmetic of which vessel a given flow rate justifies deserves its own note and I will write it separately. What matters here is only its position in the order: it comes second, before anybody has said the word filter, and it is the reason we ask what the pump is rather than what the budget is.

Then the client's problems, in the words he used

Third we ask what is actually wrong with the water, and we take the answer in his language rather than ours. In practice almost everything we are asked about in this part of the country falls into seven complaints: hardness, turbidity, odour, iron, manganese, salty water, and water that looks yellowish.

Several of those are symptoms with more than one cause. Yellowish water can be iron, it can be organics, it can be a tank nobody has opened in four years. Odour can be the source or it can be what is growing in the storage. So this is the step where we ask for a test, and if there is no test, for a photograph of the water in a clear glass and a look at the inside of the tank. We are used to that answer: on the wastewater side we ask for an influent result too, and almost nobody has one. Our catalytic iron and manganese filter — we sell it as IRON BUSTER — answers two of the seven and nothing else, and knowing which two is the whole point of asking. A client who wants the water drinkable at the tap rather than merely clean is on a different ladder again, which is what our drinking water work covers.

Asking is cheap. We learned that lesson properly on a commercial building where the fact that settled an entire objection turned out to be what the riser pipes were made of, which nobody had thought to ask and anybody could have looked at. The same is true of hardness in a kitchen: the crust in the grease trap had been a mystery on that site until somebody tested the incoming water, and the answer changed what we built downstream. Hardness is now a data item on our survey rather than something we discover later.

Then the filter, and where it is going to sit

Only at step four does a product appear, and it arrives with a location attached, because where a vessel sits changes both what it costs and whether it will still be working in two years.

A backwashing filter needs somewhere to send its backwash. A vessel in a plant room with no floor drain is a monthly argument with whoever has to service it. A unit on a roof deck is cheap to pipe and unpleasant to maintain at two in the afternoon. A vessel in a corridor will be fine until the first time somebody needs to lift the top off it. So we quote the filter and the placement together, and where the site allows more than one sensible position we give the positions as options rather than choosing for him.

That is not politeness, it is after-sales arithmetic. We have written before about treating the life of the equipment as a design problem rather than a warranty problem, and the single cheapest thing we can do for a client is put the serviceable part where a person can reach it.

Only then the price

Fifth, and only fifth, we price it. A price offered before those four steps is a product recommendation wearing a number, and it has the useful property of being very hard to argue with and very easy to be wrong about.

It also makes the comparison dishonest later. If a client holds our number against somebody else's and the two were built from different flow rates and different problem lists, he is not comparing prices at all — a point that applies just as hard on the plant side, where a price difference is almost always a scope difference first. Pricing last is what lets us show him the basis the price came from, which is the only thing that makes a comparison possible. On a wastewater job that basis is partly handed to us — the discharge standard and the parameters for the industry fix the target before we start. On a water treatment job nobody hands us a target at all, which is exactly why the four steps have to carry it.

Three options, not eight

When the quotation goes out it carries three options. I have seen quotations go out of this office with eight, and eight is absurd.

Not because the client cannot read eight. Because eight means we did not finish steps one to four. Eight options is our own indecision, bound and sent to somebody who was expecting an answer, and the work of eliminating six of them has been quietly moved onto the person least equipped to do it. Three is a choice. Eight is homework.

I want to be careful about how that sits next to something else we say often, which is that we put the routes side by side on equal footing and let the owner pick, and that we do not choose his technology for him. Both are true and they are not in tension. Our job is to narrow the field to the options that will actually work on his site and then stop narrowing. Three of those, described honestly, with what each one does and what each one does not do, is the shape. It is the same discipline as refusing to build past the end goal somebody actually has. The decision is still his. We have simply done the part of it that requires having stood on the site.

Where the range gives us a choice, we put the premium unit forward

This one is a correction of ourselves rather than a principle we arrived at cleanly. A residential softener quote came across my desk and we had offered the smaller of the two vessels we sell. My reaction at the time was roughly: when did we start putting our cheaper foot forward and not our premium foot first?

The cheaper unit is cheaper for a reason, and the reason is almost never that somebody is being generous. It is smaller, or it has less media in it, and the consequence lands later as a unit running at the top of its range all day or going through its cycle more often than anybody expected. Neither of those shows up in the quotation. Both of them show up in the client's year, which is the same argument we make about the cheaper plant that is not the cheaper plant.

So where our published range offers a genuine choice, the number we lead with is the better unit. A client who wants the cheaper one can have it quoted — we will put the difference in writing and he can decide, which is the same position we take everywhere else. What we will not do any more is default to the cheap end and call it being competitive.

The same thinking rules out one kind of design we could profit from. We will not build a system whose consumable only we can supply. A consumable with a single source is a subscription nobody signed, and a client who discovers that in year two is right to be annoyed. Locally available salt and media are a design requirement, not a convenience. It is why our own grease trap conditioner was formulated the way it was rather than built around something exotic.

We wrote the order down because the answer should not depend on who picks up the phone

Here is the honest reason this sequence exists on paper. Not everyone who quotes for us is an engineer, and when I am not in the room the questions still have to get asked in the right order. Writing it down was the only way to make the output the same whoever takes the call.

From the client's side that has a plainer meaning: the quotation he receives is the output of a procedure rather than of whoever happened to answer, and he can ask to see the steps. It is the same reason we are relaxed about somebody putting our design through an AI and checking it. If the basis is written down, it can be checked. If it cannot be checked, it was never a basis.

It also makes it easier to say no. We do not carry every product in this market — catalytic carbon is one we do not sell at all — and when the right answer for a site is something we do not stock, the procedure is what makes saying so a normal outcome instead of an awkward one. That costs us a job occasionally. It has never cost us one twice.

Where this does not transfer

The seven complaints are a Cebu and Philippine list, drawn from the water we actually see. A site on a different aquifer will hand you a different list, and if arsenic or chromium were common here our range would look different than it does.

The order travels; the products in it do not. And the order compresses where somebody has already done the work — a client arriving with a proper laboratory analysis, a measured pump curve and a drawing has collapsed steps one to three into an afternoon, and should be charged accordingly — the same boundary we draw between what we give away and what we charge for. A single fixture with no pump and no storage does not need any of this.

Where it stops being true altogether is a site whose water changes seasonally more than it changes between houses. We have jobs where the difference between March and September is larger than the difference between two buildings on the same street, and there the first four steps have to be done twice before anything is quoted. On the wastewater side we handle that by designing against more than one strength at once. On the water side it usually means waiting for a second test, and telling the client plainly that the wait is the cheapest part of the project.

If you want the same sequence run on your own site — the flow, the problems, the placement and only then a number — our commercial kitchen softening page covers the hardness half of it, and if the job is a plant rather than a filter, getting an STP starts in the same place. For anything on the wastewater side the price estimator and the design generator will get you a defensible starting figure before you speak to anybody. Our completed projects show what the finished work looks like, and the consultations page covers support on a plant somebody else built. When you want it looked at properly, book a free 15-minute consultation and bring whatever test results you have.