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Bottleless Water Coolers Rent vs. Buy
How paying $40/month to rent a water cooler will turn into thousands of dollars.A typical Bottleless Water Cooler with a high-end 4-cartridge water filtration system costs around $600 to be delivered to you (be aware of $400 and less coolers, they are either low quality, or have inadequate filtration system), and under $700 for Reverse Osmosis Water coolers. Included in the package is everything you'll need - a flexible water line, installation instructions and user manual. Coolers come with 1 year manufacturer's guarantee. Once installed, it is virtually a maintenance-free appliance, short of replacing filters. Renting a cooler may seem inexpensive, but at $40/month it will cost $480 per year. In first 16 months you will pay more in rent costs than the whole cost for you to OWN a cooler. But what about years 3, 4 and so on? You will still be making payments to rental company. With a purchased cooler, the only cost is replacement filters. Bottleless Cooler Rental Scam. Companies who rent water coolers typically require you to sign a 5-year lease. That's $2400 over 5 years. Then they turn around and sell the lease to a finance company, who bills you. That company may not be in business 3 years down the road, may change ownership, may not have the filters available and so on. While you are still making payments, you may loose the only advantage that you've had with rental coolers - maintenance-free unit. How do I know which cooler to buy? A typical water cooler company will claim "purity" and will throw lingo at you, such as "5 micron", "chlorine taste and odor", "pure water" etc. You should know that most of the times it is a fancy slang for "cheap carbon filter". A filter that's a "sediment" is usually required for well water source or in old buildings/plumbing (hello, New York City!), but the cost of sediment filter is LOW. Coolers must have a multi-filter filtration system, as recent advancements in water filtration technologies show that separation of filtration processes is preferential to a single-filter approach. A typical high end cooler will host 3-5 filters, or at least 3-5 STAGES of filtration. Just because a company listed a fancy graphics on its site that shows 40 removed contaminants doesn't meant its filters are good, a single carbon filter may remove all these (if present). If a rental company offers $19/month payments and FREE filter replacement, think about how can they make money. If they earn $228 per year minus $50 filter replacement twice a year, does it sound like they need 4-5 years to break even? Or will they give you a cheaply made machine with lower end filter? Do you want to take chances? Am I drinking Pure Water? Chances are high that you are already using purified water, as water utilities purify tap water for you. The majority of bottled water is purified, including that bottled water delivered in a fancy truck to your neighbors weekly. It is nothing but PURIFIED TAP WATER. The difference in purity between tap, bottled, and a filtered cooler water is minor. |
