Slight change of topic, but this is one reason I believe we're overly fearful of nuclear energy. Nobody seems to give a damn about dangerous chemicals that can cause cancer and are nearly impossible to detect. But everyone is scared to death about radioctive materials that can cause cancer and are easily detected (Geiger counter).

"What kind of equipment would you need to check your drinking water for any kind of contamination? What would it cost?"

You need to send it away for testing - it would be impractical to home test for all of the things you'd want to test for.

It's likely that your local municipality has a testing service that you can send water into for $50 or $100 and have rough testing done for lead and e-coli and crypto and so on.

A more extensive (and expensive) test will test for essentially everything, including VOCs and chemicals and all manner of manufacturing byproducts, plastics, phthalates, etc.

That would cost you $600 or $800 ...

The appropriate local municipality is probably your county health department, who almost certainly has results from the last time your home was sold on file. Here, it's $15 to retest, or a couple bucks and a FOIA request to get all previous records.

I do have 65 ppt of PFAS in my well water (one of the gray dots in West Michigan, where Wolverine operated a tannery that dumped Scotchguard-treated leather scrap in local swamps). The test for that (and various other contaminants) ran $650. Yeah, Wolverine is paying for that and the carbon filters in my basement, but it kinda sucks to have been drinking it for 30 years. At least they caught it when my kid was onky exposed in the womb and his formula until he was 1...

Depends on what you're looking to detect and what kind of facility you have access to.

A few hundred dollars will get you a lab test for common contaminants, but the cost rises exponentially for anything beyond that.

You can probably take a sample and send it off to an analysis lab. Some things have simple tests but you'd probably want the full spectrum.