Woodbury Water Treatment Showroom: What a Guided Visit Looks Like

The A.J. Alberts water treatment showroom sits at 7975 Afton Road in Woodbury, and visits are scheduled by appointment. That is deliberate. It means a master plumber is set aside for you, not splitting attention across a sales floor, and you leave knowing your hardness in grains per gallon, your iron, your chlorine, your pH, and your total dissolved solids. There is no charge and no commissioned salesperson attached to the result. Free water testing is also done in your home, which is how most customers do it.

Most people meet their plumber during an emergency. Water treatment is the opposite kind of decision. Nothing is flooding, nothing is broken, and you have time to actually understand what you are buying before you buy it. That is the entire reason we keep a showroom on Afton Road instead of running everything out of a truck, and the reason we schedule visits rather than leaving it to chance.

Here is what a visit actually looks like, and what you should walk out with.

Where is the showroom and how do I visit?

7975 Afton Road, Woodbury, MN 55125. Look for the A.J. Alberts Plumbing sign on Afton Road. Call 651-738-0580 or book online to set a time.

We schedule showroom visits rather than running an open sales floor, because the useful part is not the room, it is the person standing in it with you. When you book a time, a master plumber is expecting you and has time to answer questions properly. Inside, alongside the water treatment side of the business, there are working faucet, fixture, and shower displays from TOTO and Kohler, so if you are weighing a bathroom project at the same time you can turn handles instead of guessing from a website photo.

We have been at this address serving Woodbury, Afton, Lake Elmo, Cottage Grove, Stillwater, Oakdale, and Hudson since long before most of those neighborhoods had their current subdivisions. Locally owned since 1989, licensed in Minnesota under PC150039.

What does a water test actually measure?

Whether we test at your home or you bring a sample to your appointment, we run the same panel while you watch:

• Hardness in grains per gallon, the number that sizes a softener and explains your scale
• Iron, the source of orange staining in toilets, tubs, and laundry
• Chlorine, the city disinfectant behind the taste and smell people complain about most
• pH, because acidic water is hard on copper and alkaline water leaves residue
• Total dissolved solids, the overall mineral snapshot
• Odor and taste, sulfur or metallic notes that point to a specific cause

Then we explain what the numbers mean for your house, in plain language. Not a brochure, not a scare pitch. If your water does not need treatment, we will tell you that too, and it will not have cost you a dollar.

How to take a sample that is worth testing

If you are bringing a sample to a showroom appointment, a few basics matter, because a bad sample gives a bad answer. Use a clean container and rinse it with the water you are sampling. Run the cold tap for a minute or two first so you are testing the supply, not water that has been sitting in the pipe overnight. Fill the container to the very top so there is minimal air, cap it, and bring it the same day.

That last part matters more than people expect. Dissolved iron in a fresh sample is clear, and it oxidizes into visible rust particles once it sits open in a jar. Chlorine also fades. A sample that has been in a cup holder for three days will not tell either of us the truth.

Why does a water treatment showroom make sense in Woodbury specifically?

Because Woodbury water gives homeowners two separate problems, and they need two separate answers.

Hardness. The city reports its supply at roughly 250 to 360 mg/L as calcium carbonate, about 15 to 21 grains per gallon. Woodbury calls that hard. On the USGS scale, anything over 10.5 grains per gallon is very hard. The city also states plainly that municipal softening is not currently provided, and that the new treatment plant is being designed so softening could be added at some future point. Translation for a homeowner: softening is your call, in your basement, on your budget.

PFAS. Woodbury sits inside the documented 3M contamination zone. The Minnesota Department of Health has advisories on nine of the city’s 20 wells, and the city treats affected wells with granular activated carbon at a temporary facility plus interim well treatment buildings while a permanent plant is constructed. That work is real and it targets current federal limits. It is also municipal treatment, not household treatment, and the federal rules themselves are in motion. In May 2026 the EPA proposed keeping the 4 parts per trillion limits for PFOA and PFOS while allowing systems to request until 2031 to comply, and proposed rescinding the limits for several other PFAS compounds.

We are not in the business of predicting federal rulemaking. We are in the business of telling Woodbury families that the water arriving at the meter and the water coming out of the drinking tap do not have to be the same thing. Our Woodbury drinking water report breakdown goes through the annual numbers line by line.

Showroom visit or in-home water test: which one do you need?

Both are free. They answer different questions.

The short version: the free water test happens at your house, because that is where your water, your softener, and your water heater actually live. Book a showroom visit when you want to put your hands on the equipment first. Plenty of customers do both.

How do you size a softener correctly?

This is where a showroom conversation saves people real money, because the math is not complicated and almost nobody is shown it.

Start with daily water use. The standard planning figure is 75 to 80 gallons per person per day. A family of four is therefore around 300 to 320 gallons a day. Multiply by your hardness. At Woodbury’s 18 grains per gallon, that is roughly 5,400 to 5,800 grains of hardness to remove every day.

A properly sized unit regenerates about every five to seven days, with reserve capacity left over for the weeks when the in-laws visit or the kids are home all summer. Undersize it and the unit regenerates constantly, burns salt, and wears out early. Oversize it badly and you paid for capacity you will never use, and the resin bed can sit too long between regenerations.

If you have iron in the mix, and plenty of St. Croix Valley and Western Wisconsin wells do, iron removal has to be staged ahead of or within the softener, not assumed away. That is a real design decision, not a checkbox. Details are on our water softener installation page.

What should you look for when comparing equipment?

Ask about independent certification, then stop reading marketing copy. Three standards do almost all the work:

• NSF/ANSI 44 covers residential cation exchange water softeners. A certified unit has demonstrated it reduces hardness to 1 grain per gallon or less at rated flow. If a product claims to handle hardness but has no NSF/ANSI 44 listing, ask why.
• NSF/ANSI 53 covers carbon and anion exchange systems, and it is where PFAS reduction claims live for those technologies.
• NSF/ANSI 58 covers reverse osmosis systems, which is the right tool for drinking and cooking water. Certified RO systems are tested for structural integrity and material safety along with contaminant reduction.

The detail people miss: certification is model specific and claim specific. A model can be certified for chlorine reduction and say nothing about PFAS. Confirm the exact model number and the exact contaminant on the listing. If you want the drinking water side handled, our reverse osmosis systems page explains where RO fits and where it does not.

Is any of this going to turn into a sales pitch?

No, and that is deliberate. A.J. Alberts has ten working plumbers, five of them master plumbers, and zero commissioned salespeople. Nobody in the building takes home more money because you left with a softener. That is the same reason we are a back-to-back Best of Woodbury winner and hold a 4.9 star average across hundreds of Google reviews.

You will get your numbers, an honest read on whether they justify equipment, and written pricing if and when you ask for it. If the answer is that your water is fine, that is the answer. For a deeper look at what each measurement actually means, read what we check in a free water test, or see the local specifics for your city on our Woodbury service page.

Sources and Further Reading

• City of Woodbury, Water Softening and water hardness
• Minnesota Department of Health, PFAS in drinking water
• NSF, standards for water treatment systems

The Bottom Line

Woodbury hands its homeowners hard water and a PFAS legacy, and the city has been clear that softening is not part of municipal treatment today. That makes household water treatment a decision every family here eventually faces. The worst way to make it is from a search results page at 10 PM. The best way is with your own water in front of you and a licensed plumber reading the numbers out loud.

Schedule a free in-home water test and we will bring the test kit to you, or call 651-738-0580 to book a guided visit to the Woodbury showroom on Afton Road. No charge either way, and no pressure.

Call 651-738-0580 to schedule your free water test or a showroom visit. A.J. Alberts Plumbing and Water Conditioning, locally owned since 1989, MN License PC150039.