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Quality Assurances & Quality Control

Our team at Tap Score, along with Tap Score’s national laboratory network, take your environmental health very seriously. Our mission is to give you the power of advanced laboratory testing along with cutting edge health sciences and engineering support from the convenience of home or office. In so doing, we organize thousands of home testing packages and offer some of the lowest lab testing costs ever available in the USA.

Tap Score is proud to offer the most critical and interesting environmental testing options, using advanced laboratory resources, certified testing methods and industry standard procedures. To minimize your testing costs and to optimize your sampling safety, several parameters analyzed in Tap Score’s informational testing packages are tested by the lab using methods which may not comply to your State’s relevant boards’ requirements for regulatory compliance. While this kind of compliance testing is mandatory for government regulated entities (like a water utility) it is often considerably more expensive than the standard informational testing which Tap Score provides.

For clients who need a state compliant report, for ANY parameter, we also offer targeted certified lab testing options for clients in every US State. These tests are substantially more expensive because they require hazardous preservatives, professional sampling, more water volume and more expensive lab time. If you want this level of precision for a particular contaminant, we suggest ordering your State’s Certified Testing option (For Tap Score Compliance, Click Here).

If you have questions about the particular accuracy of a testing method or contaminant, please contact us (hello@gosimplelab.com) and we’ll be happy to provide further details.

Like all water test results, your Tap Score water quality report has inherent inaccuracies which we work to understand, limit and explain. Here are possible sources of inaccuracy that we are aware of in every Informational, non compliance Tap Score Report:

    • Sampling time may not capture all contaminants at that time of day
    • Sampling location may not capture all contaminants you are exposed to
    • Sampling accuracy may result in accidental contamination by your hands or some other material that gets into your sampling vial
    • The shipping and handling of samples may result in unexpected environmental conditions like super high temperatures during transit, which can change water chemistry before it arrives at the lab
    • All testing methods in the lab have inherent inaccuracies which labs work hard to minimize with proper machine maintenance and regular calibration
    • Some parameters included in the Informational Packages are analyzed and reported as proxy-tests (lower accuracy than for other compounds). For these proxy-test compounds we recommend (and offer here) higher precision Targeted Testing for folks who want a more zeroed in result. For the Essential and Advanced Test kits, this includes results for nitrates, uranium, mercury, fluoride and strontium. The extent of this inaccuracy is difficult to quantify (it could be negligible, it could be 2x the reported value) so we encourage you to view these parameters as estimates rather than exact measures.