Water Test

I have become increasingly concerned about the quality of our water here.  I knew as soon as we moved in that the water was hard with lots of minerals in it.  It's incredibly hard to clean with it and hard to clean off the scale build-up in places where it collects (like the shower).  We have a pretty thorough water testing kit for use with the fish aquariums and we used that the day we moved in, but there's only so much we can test for.  We weren't able to get an answer from the owners of this property by way of our realtor as to when the well was last serviced, but it is under a decade old.  I was a bit concerned though, because there have been a few earthquakes here in the last few years.  I feel like that's the kind of thing that should be checked out afterwards. 

After all of the problems we've had with the health of our pets that occurred within months of moving in, I thought maybe the water was the common thread between them even though the vet said that it was not likely the case.  Our 10 year old bunny, Duchess, had a calcium buildup that her kidneys just couldn't process and she passed away a few weeks ago, Ani has been sick twice with an undiagnosed & untreated malady that eventually cleared on its own (both times in the same week of spring in the 2 years we've been here), and now one of my newly adopted guinea pigs has blood in her urine which is often a symptom of bladder stones (usually caused by too much calcium) or a UTI.  We do use bottled water the majority of the time, but Ani likes playing in his water so much, he goes through a few gallons a day, so it's not really reasonable to use it in his porch water dish where he plays the most.  We also use filtered water from our Brita, but I assume it doesn't filter everything out. 

Yesterday Hubby took two water samples to Environmental Systems Service for testing; one sample is being tested for bacterial content and the other for mineral content.  It's costing us $40 to get our water tested but because we are on an artisanal well and there is no county water here, we have no other option.  We could go to the regional health and environmental services but it'd cost a few hundred dollars to have the well tested.  I feel like that's something the owners of the property should do anyway.   I look foward to finding out what the test results are.  I hope it's fine, but just knowing will be one thing I can take off my mind.