Partner standards

What we require from every professional who receives a request through Home Water Compass — and what gets a partner removed.

Before a provider is listed

• Confirmed identity — legal name and DBA where relevant, so the company named on your screen is the company that calls you.
• Verified service scope — service categories, covered ZIP codes, business hours and time zone, so availability shown to you reflects reality, not marketing reach.
• License and insurance verification where the service and state require it, with the credential displayed on the match page.
• A signed agreement covering everything on this page. Providers without a completed, verified record are never displayed — there is no provisional listing.

The consumer-contact rules

• One named company only. Your request goes to the single provider shown on your screen at the moment you consented — never to a list, never resold, never re-routed to an affiliate.
• Contact for this request only. Your details may be used to respond to the project you described. Adding you to marketing lists, or contacting you months later about other services, is a violation.
• Respect the no. If you decline, the matter ends. Repeated calls after a clear no are grounds for removal.
• No reselling, ever. Transferring or selling consumer contact information to any third party is immediate grounds for termination.

Capacity and availability honesty

Providers set daily request limits and business hours, and we enforce them: at capacity or after hours, the provider is simply not offered, and we don't collect your number for a queue nobody committed to serving. An emergency pause is available to providers — and to us — the moment something goes wrong.

Conduct on the job

• Quotes must be honest about repair-versus-replace economics; a provider who reflexively quotes replacement where a documented repair was reasonable invites review.
• No scare tactics: telling a customer their water is "dangerous" without evidence contradicts everything this site stands for and is treated as a serious violation.
• Complaints from users are logged against the provider's record and reviewed; patterns end the partnership.

Merchants and product partners

Product and test-kit links follow the same philosophy: the specific model must carry a current, verifiable certified claim for the concern it's recommended against, listings must reflect real stock and price, and expired certifications suppress the listing automatically. Merchants have no influence over which category we recommend — see methodology.

How partners pay us

Participating providers pay for qualified requests; merchants may pay commissions on purchases. Compensation is disclosed next to every commercial action (full disclosure) and never changes whether a professional route fits your situation — routes are decided by fit and evidence first, economics last.

Enforcement

• Violations of the contact rules trigger investigation, suspension during review, and removal for confirmed serious breaches.
• Removed providers are not silently re-listed under new names — identity verification exists precisely to prevent that.
• If a provider you met through this site broke these rules, report it via the contact page with your request reference — every request has one, and we can trace exactly what was agreed to.