I am in the early stages of picking a water softener to be installed at my house and having read about 2 years worth of posts on this site, wanted to find out what the average or approximate costs of an install should be.

For reference, I am on community well water in Oregon and the basics are taken care of at the well head but the neighborhood has always suffered from high iron content and hard water.

I have had the water basically tested and it comes out as:

Hardness - 10 gpg

Iron - .3 ppm

pH. - 7.6

We get a lot of calcium on faucets as well as manganese stains in the toilet tanks and also possibly in the shower and the toilet bowls. Rust forms in sinks and we get a lot of ruined laundry from iron stains.

The house has 2.5 bathrooms, 3 bedrooms and there are two of us living there and no plans for any additions; very rarely we have between 1-4 guests staying. We do not have a jacuzzi or any thing more complex than a dishwasher and washer.

I'm in the (slow) process of getting quotes but am finding many companies in my area to be quite unresponsive. The Culligan and Kinetico franchises haven't exactly raced around to sell their products and from what I understand, they will probably be very expensive anyway.

I did have a local water treatment company come around and they advised the following:

1 x Oxi-1054CC Filter system (ProSeries) 3.0 - 6.0 flow rate; 10" x 54" tank size. $2,195

1 x SP-948CC Softener (ProSeries)30,000 grains, 8.8 flow rate; 9" x 48" tank size. $1,995

Installation would entail getting into my crawl space, adding the pipes to get to my garage where the equipment would be located. They quoted me $500 for this, using 1" PEX and then sending the drain pipe (I assume for post-regeneration) about six feet to my back garage wall and then plumb into the gutter drainpipe which goes to an underground pipe and drains to an underground street sewer, eventually ending up at the city water treatment plant.

From my looking around on line, these prices seem very high and I was surprised because I was expecting the local water treatment firms to be competitive.

What is a reasonable profit margin to expect from these companies? I am reading that a water softener probably costs a couple of hundred dollars to assemble but with reasonable profit built in, can be bought online for no more than $700.

I balked at the total cost quoted ($4,690) but does that sound reasonable, especially compared to what the equivalent will probably turn out to be when I finally hear from the "big boys"?

I appreciate your thoughts on this as I navigate through the complexities that are buying a water softener without feeling like I'm getting ripped off.