Discovery Marketing & Distribution,Inc. Fraudulently presented and sold a simple water softener as a "whole house water treatment system" Orlando, Florida

In November 2009, a Home Depot display in Lady Lake, FL, presented the "Rainsoft Whole-House Water Conditioning System" as the solution to foul-tasting, hard, city-supplied water in north central Florida. A salesman visited, tested our water, insisting how wonderful the Rainsoft system was and how badly we needed it. He claimed that the "Discovery system" was far more than a water softener: it was a "water conditioning system." He hooked up a miniature Discovery system to our kitchen faucet and told me to make OJ from concentrate or Crystal Lite drink with the "conditioned" water. The result was good tasting, far better than the raw city water, that is.

Whether the device within the Discovery kitchen system demonstration was what a whole house system contained, I could not know for certain. Looking back, I know that he was a "super salesman" and I had been "taken." We had to buy that day or a 10% savings would be lost. As it was a "whole-house system," and my "full purchase price would be credited to me on any future replacement model" of theirs, we reluctantly agreed to the $2830.00 price.

I should have stopped the sale at the point of installation, as Discovery sent an inexperienced young man who insisted on installing the unit outside, where the south sun damaged the control unit and caused an $85 repair in short order. I called the company and demanded to talk to the manager. I read to him the service manual's very words: "The water softener and control should not be exposed to direct sunlight or atmospheric precipitation." I demanded that he have it installed in my garage, as it should have been originally. He reluctantly agreed. What a mess the second installer created, digging a trench through the front yard's shrubs.

A couple years passed, regularly adding salt to the unit's tank, just like I had always done with the conventional water softeners in our two former houses back in Illinois. When I began to notice that our water wasn't as soft as usual, I had a competitor bid on replacement. That salesman pointed out that all I really had was a simple, old-fashioned water softener, worth at most $700 new! I had paid more than 4 times that much for the Discovery unit! What a sucker I was!

Don't let any salesman pitch you for more than 15 minutes! Discovery Marketing & Distributing out of Orlando used high pressure techniques, misrepresentation of product, and very poor service people. I wasted over $2100 ($2830 - $700 = $2130) on what was really just a simple water softener. I would have gotten an attorney over this fraudulent situation if suing didn't cost about as much as what I might gain. Be smarter than my wife and I were. Compare competitors and features of a product very carefully.