Is the water hard in Huntsville? What it does to your plumbing

It depends on which water reaches your house. Most Huntsville Utilities water comes from the Tennessee River and runs about 65 to 75 mg/L of hardness, roughly 4 grains per gallon, which is moderately hard. The utility’s wells draw from limestone and run about 160 to 170 mg/L, roughly 9 to 10 grains per gallon, which is hard. Either way you’ll see some scale, but plenty of homes here do fine without a softener.

How do I find out how hard my water is?

The easiest way is your utility’s yearly water quality report, also called a Consumer Confidence Report. It lists hardness along with everything else they test for. If you’re in Huntsville and don’t know whether you get mostly river water or well water, call Huntsville Utilities and ask.

Other cities around here pull from different places. Madison Utilities treats mostly Tennessee River water at its Quarry Water Treatment Plant and uses wells during high demand. Decatur Utilities draws from Wheeler Reservoir. Athens Utilities uses the Elk River. Their reports will have the hardness numbers for your area.

You can also test it yourself. Hardness test strips are cheap at any hardware store. Dip one in a glass of cold tap water and match the color to the chart. Some read in grains per gallon and some in mg/L. To convert, 1 grain per gallon is 17.1 mg/L.

If you’re on a private well, the utility report doesn’t apply to you. Test your own water.

What hard water does to your plumbing

Hard water carries dissolved calcium and magnesium. When it evaporates or gets heated, those minerals get left behind as scale. Here’s where you’ll notice it:

• White crust around faucets and on showerheads, and clogged faucet aerators. A clogged aerator is one of the first things to check if you’ve got low water pressure.
• Spots and film on glasses and dishes, and a ring in the toilet bowl that keeps coming back.
• Sediment in a tank water heater. Minerals settle on the bottom, and over time you’ll hear popping and rumbling when it heats. Flushing the tank helps.
• Scale inside a tankless water heater. Tankless units are more sensitive to buildup and usually need to be descaled on a regular schedule.
• Shorter life for some appliances that heat or hold water, like dishwashers, ice makers, and coffee makers.

At around 4 grains per gallon, most of that is a maintenance chore. You wipe the faucets, soak the showerhead now and then, and flush the water heater. At 9 or 10 grains, it builds up faster and gets harder to keep ahead of.

Water softener or water filter: what’s the difference?

People mix these up all the time, and it leads to buying the wrong thing.

A water softener handles hardness. It swaps the calcium and magnesium for sodium (or potassium, if you use that kind of salt) as water passes through a tank of resin beads. Every so often it rinses itself and dumps that rinse water down a drain. You keep it stocked with salt. It does nothing much for taste or chlorine smell.

A carbon filter handles taste and odor, mainly chlorine. It can be a whole-house unit or a small one under the kitchen sink. It doesn’t remove hardness, so it won’t stop scale.

So if white crust and spotty dishes are what bug you, that’s a softener job. A filter is for tap water that tastes or smells like a swimming pool. Some houses have both.

Do you need a water softener in Huntsville?

Honestly, plenty of homes here don’t. If you’re on river water at around 4 grains and the scale doesn’t bug you much, a bottle of vinegar and an annual water heater flush may be all you ever need.

A softener starts to make more sense if you’re getting well water in the 9 to 10 grain range, if you’ve got a tankless water heater you want to protect, or if you’re just tired of scrubbing crust off fixtures every other week. It’s a real appliance with upkeep. You’ll be buying salt, and it needs a spot near where the main line comes in plus a drain nearby. That’s worth weighing against what the scale is actually costing you.

We install softeners and filtration systems. If you’re not sure you need one, ask us. We’ll tell you what we’d do in your house, even when the answer is nothing.