This is one house in Antigua, documented as it gets built out. The owner is Guatemalan, lives here, and bought this equipment for his own home: a five-person, four-bathroom house on cistern-fed municipal water. Every price came off a vendor page, a written quote, a spec sheet, a marketplace listing or a test we ran ourselves, on the date we say it did. Redacted invoices and test-strip photos go up as the slots get filled.
It is unfinished, and the pages say so. As of 3 September 2026 the reverse osmosis is installed, the pump is in transit and has never been powered on, the softener is not bought and the spin-down filter is not in the country.
Quick summary
- The sequence matters more than the brands. Pressure before filtration, sediment before resin, softener before reverse osmosis, nothing on the street inlet.
- A softener does not lower TDS. It fixes scale. Drinking water is a separate machine.
- There is no best courier, only a crossover around 30 pounds, and duty class moves more money than courier choice.
- Local wins more often than an import blog would admit: three of these four pages recommend buying at least one item in Guatemala.
- Every number is dated. Prices here moved inside four weeks, and one item went from out of stock on 5 August 2026 to de-listed on 6 August 2026, in a day.
The order of operations
| Stage | What it is | Why it comes here |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | Cistern | Already there in most Guatemalan houses, and a free first filter: heavy grit settles out. Nothing goes on the street inlet, where a filter clogs silently and the house runs dry |
| 1 | Pressure | Everything downstream needs it stable. Reverse osmosis will not fill properly on a system that keeps cycling between a cut-in and a cut-out pressure |
| 2 | Sediment, two stages | A self-flushing 50-micron spin-down, then a fat 5-micron cartridge. A 5-micron cartridge alone on cistern water blinds in weeks |
| 3 | Softener | The hardness fix for the whole house. Program it from a real hardness number, not a brochure |
| 4 | Reverse osmosis at the kitchen sink | Drinking water. A softener does not lower TDS; only RO does |
A fifth decision runs through all of it without being a stage: what to buy locally and what to import, taken item by item on weight and duty class.
Background we do not re-argue here: Antigua water and utilities on sector reliability and why a cistern is standard, water safety in Guatemala on what is drinkable, and the live water outage and power outage feeds.
The four pages
Water softener in Guatemala
The question is not which softener, it is who in this country will actually sell you one. The house tested 250-425 ppm hard on a 17-in-1 strip with a bottled-water control on 29 August 2026. Two sweeps found a single retailer stocking residential units; a third found a locally assembled unit at Q5,293 on the vendor’s published price list of 23 August 2026, cheaper and more repairable than a Q7,710 stocked unit (read 5 August 2026) and a Q9,039 imported-valve system (read 20 August 2026). Sizing turned on flow, not capacity.
Reverse osmosis for a cistern-fed house
Local won on price, and won twice; the import only won when the specification changed. The local answer is a five-stage unit at Q1,473 plus a Q395 alkaline cartridge, Q1,868 on the vendor’s own pages on 5 August 2026, in stock, with cartridges you can rebuy in the same shop forever. The imported one, ordered 20 August 2026 at $280.48, lands at an estimated Q3,633 with NSF/ANSI-58 certification, remineralisation and a UV lamp at the dispense point. Anyone who does not need those three things should buy the local pair and stop.
House water pressure: cistern plus VFD pump
A variable-frequency-drive pump replaces the pump and the pressure tank at once. It displaced an 85-gallon pressure tank at Q11,085 whose whole line was out of stock on 5 August 2026 anyway, and the pivot on 8 August 2026 cut roughly Q8,760 from the project. Buying new locally is a real option, with a Guatemalan Grundfos dealer quoting Q6,700-7,100 on 23 August 2026; only a used import beats it. The page is mostly about reading the nameplate in the seller’s own photographs, which exposed about ten generic dropship accounts listing the machine at half the legitimate floor.
Read the pressure and pump page
Which import channel to use
Run both calculators every time, on the actual weight, in the actual duty category. One 130-lb machine quoted four ways on 20 August 2026 came to Q9,039 through a Guatemalan reseller’s flat mirror, against Q10,647 and Q11,842 from two air couriers running their own calculators. A 31-lb filtration system flipped the other way, Q2,926 against Q3,239. Across four documented shipments and quotes, our own arithmetic on the documented figures puts overhead between about a third of goods value and over four-fifths. The original invoice story stays in importing solar equipment to Guatemala.
What it has cost so far
Statuses as of 3 September 2026. There is deliberately no total, because these rows are not the same kind of number.
| Stage | Chosen | Price | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pump | Used VFD constant-pressure pump, imported | $457.37 paid, order dated 31 Aug 2026; about Q4,600-4,950 landed (estimate) | In transit, never powered on |
| Sediment 1 | Self-flushing 50-micron spin-down | $205.79 (live listing 23 Aug 2026, not yet purchased) | Arriving later by family carry |
| Sediment 2 | Big Blue housing, bought locally | Q275, order reported 30 Aug 2026 (no receipt on file) plus $23.99 cartridges (read 30 Aug 2026) | Housing ordered |
| Softener | Locally assembled unit, metered valve | Q5,293 (published price, 23 Aug 2026) | Not purchased |
| Reverse osmosis | 7-stage, remineralisation and UV, imported | $304.75 paid, order dated 20 Aug 2026; about Q3,633 landed (estimate) | Installed 29 Aug 2026 |
| Faucet hole | Diamond cup and arbor | Q139.98 (in stock, 29 Aug 2026) | Bought |
Running costs, each traceable to its own page: salt at Q2,500-3,800 a year, RO filters at about $95 a year, a Big Blue cartridge at about Q92 a year, a replacement spin-down screen at $37.99, about Q290 at the Q7.6237 rate (Amazon, read 23 August 2026), every one to two years. Where those sit in a budget is with the utilities and electricity data.
Where we did it out of order
The reverse osmosis went in before the softener, because drinking water was the urgent half. That is defensible, since the membrane is a replaceable consumable, but it is not free: on unsoftened 250-425 ppm feed water the membrane ages faster, and the manufacturer’s own schedule puts stages 1-3 at six months, sooner on very hard water until the softener is in. If your budget forces the same order, that is the cost of the shortcut.
What we got wrong
- Two sweeps concluded there was one supplier. A third found a cheaper, better one. A sweep returning “there is only one option” is a claim about your instrument, not the market.
- An earlier pass ruled that importing won on reverse osmosis. It did not. Local won on price, twice; only a change of specification flipped it.
- A scrape “proved” a vendor discount was fabricated. The raw HTML had both prices all along. Absence in a lossy scrape is not absence on the page.
What is coming
The next pages from the same house. None exists yet, and nothing here is a finding.
- A comparison of the solar brands actually available here, alongside the solar in Guatemala guide and the Tigo optimizer purchase, which used the same used-equipment import play as the pump.
- Our own EEGSA bills decoded line by line, against what the electricity page publishes.
- A running log of this house’s water and power interruptions, next to the live outage feeds.
How to read the prices here
Every figure is a dated reading, not a current price, and showing the movement is the point. Conversions use the rate named beside the figure; the working rate for the August 2026 purchases was Q7.6237 per US dollar on 20 August 2026, and the live one is on our exchange rates page. For duty and IVA on your own import, use the import calculator, and see the shipping section for the courier market.
Frequently Asked Questions
What order should I do this in?
Cistern first (most Guatemalan houses already have one, and it is your free first filter, since heavy grit settles out). Then pressure, because everything downstream needs it stable. Then two sediment stages, a self-flushing 50-micron spin-down ahead of a fat 5-micron cartridge. Then the softener for the whole house. Then reverse osmosis at the kitchen sink for drinking water. One rule overrides all of it: put nothing on the street inlet, because a filter there clogs silently and the house runs dry.
Does a water softener make tap water drinkable?
No. A softener swaps calcium and magnesium for sodium; total dissolved solids stay exactly where they were. Only reverse osmosis lowers TDS. This is the most common misreading of a TDS pen in Guatemala: people install a softener, read the pen, see no change and conclude the unit is broken. For what is drinkable and where, see our water safety guide.
Is it cheaper to import this equipment or buy it in Guatemala?
It depends on weight and on duty class, and it flipped three times inside one month in this house. On one 130-lb machine, quoted on 20 August 2026, a Guatemalan reseller’s flat Amazon mirror came in at Q9,039 while two air couriers quoted Q10,647 and Q11,842 in their own calculators. On a 31-lb filtration system the same day, the per-pound courier won at Q2,926 against the mirror’s Q3,239. The crossover sits somewhere around 30 pounds. Three of the four pages in this cluster end up recommending a local purchase for at least one line item.
How much did the whole build cost?
We do not publish a project total, on purpose. The rows in this page mix a price we paid, a live listing price for something not yet bought, a published vendor price for a unit we have not purchased, and two landed-cost estimates from courier calculators. Adding those into one number would produce a figure that is not true of anything. The rows are shown with their status instead, so you can add whichever ones apply to you.
Is the system installed and running?
Partly, as of 3 September 2026. The reverse osmosis unit was installed on 29 August 2026. The pressure pump is in transit and has never been powered on. The softener is not purchased. The spin-down filter is not in the country. Because of that there is no noise measurement, no before-and-after pressure reading and no post-install TDS number anywhere in this cluster, and there will not be one until we take it.
