Aging infrastructure has spurred elevated levels of heavy metals in drinking water across the United States. Individual and community access to reputable home tests have been stymied by the expense, limited portability, and impracticality of many existing testing technologies. We developed a new low-cost closed-cell bipolar electrochemical technique that couples conventional anodic stripping voltammetry with on-chip optical readout to a cell phone device in an inherently parallelized fashion. This presentation will introduce the sensing scheme which couples a cathodic electrochemiluminescence (ECL) reaction at one pole of the bipolar electrode with an anodic stripping event at the opposite pole. When the chip is operated in a close-cell bipolar format, near 100% Faradaic efficiencies can be achieved. Electrochemical implications of both the physical chip design and the electrolyte composition on the sensor functionality will be described. Detailed electrochemical characterization of the Ru(bpy) ECL reaction system will also be highlighted. More recent efforts towards replacing ECL readout with an all solid-state transduction mechanism will also be mentioned, with an emphasis on significantly increasing the analysis precision and chip reusability while achieving detection limits in the sub part per billion range.