How To Treat Your Home's Municipal Water
City water may be treated, but some municipal water supplies still require in-home water treatment.
Although city water from municipal water systems is usually treated before it reaches your home, it often remains hard and may contain trace levels of contaminants. Municipal water treatment plants are required to meet federal regulations, but keeping up with rising demands and emerging water quality challenges can make it difficult to consistently meet these standards. More importantly, federal standards may not always align with your personal expectations for taste, clarity, or overall water quality. Even if the water leaves the treatment plant pristine, it travels through aging distribution pipes and possibly older plumbing within your home, where it can pick up additional impurities such as rust, sediment, or trace minerals.
Homeowners have a variety of water treatment options to improve city water quality. The best approach depends on the water’s specific composition and how it will be used in the home—for drinking, cooking, bathing, or appliance use. Common solutions include water softeners to reduce hardness, filtration systems to remove sediment and chlorine, and reverse osmosis units for high-purity drinking water. By understanding the quality of your water and selecting the appropriate treatment system, you can enjoy cleaner, safer, and better-tasting water throughout your home.
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How To Further Treat Your Water
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Working water
Working water, for washing, bathing and cleaning, makes up 99 percent of the water that’s used in the home. Even though your water is supplied by a city or municipality, it is probably hard and likely contains a disinfectant like chlorine or chloramine. Hardness can cause problems with your water-using appliances, surfaces that come in contact with water, fixtures and tableware. Over time, chlorine/chloramine can damage your clothing in the wash, and it can dry out rubber seals in water-using appliances. City working water is frequently treated with a prefilter, water softener and dechlorination or chloramine removal system.
Drinking water
Although the water you use for drinking and cooking makes up about one percent of the water used in your home, its quality is probably most important to you. To make sure water is safe for human consumption, water supplies are treated with disinfectants at the water treatment facility. These disinfectants ensure the water meets guidelines set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). For safety reasons, the disinfectant must remain in the water while it travels through the distribution system to your home, but once there, it is no longer needed (or wanted).
Common City Water Problems and Contaminants
Although most city water is treated, it can still cause problems around your home. Common city water contaminants and issues include:
- Chlorine and Chloramine: These chemicals are necessary for disinfection, but they can add unwanted tastes and smells to water. Chlorine and Chloramines can also dry out skin, hair, rubber seals and parts in water-using appliances and can fade fabrics more rapidly when washed.
- Staining: City water can still stain and ruin clothing, sinks, tubs, toilets, water-using appliances, even tableware. A replacement may be required, or it could take a lot of effort to remove the stain.
- Tastes and odors: Chlorine taste and odor are common complaints. During certain times of the year, many also notice an unpleasant algae smell and taste. Algal blooms could also be responsible for minor health-related issues.
- Scale and hard water: Scale or limescale is the white, chalky buildup from hard water minerals in water that’s left on fixtures and water-using appliances. It is unsightly and can reduce the life, appearance and efficiency of fixtures, water appliances and other items around your home. Some water treatment plants reduce the amount of hardness in the water, but they don’t provide you with soft water.
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How to Improve City Water
Drinking Water Systems
Drinking water systems are necessary when municipal water users want to reduce the level of contaminants, chlorine or chloramine, bad tastes and odors from water. Kinetico has a variety of solutions to improve drinking water. The K5 Drinking Water Station with VOC Guard is a reverse osmosis system certified to reduce more contaminants than any other similar drinking water system. It has multiple configurations that allow you to customize the filtration for your home.
Water Softeners
Water softeners can solve a lot of challenges for city water users. Many blame their appliances or soaps and detergents when the real problem is their water. Kinetico Premier Series water softeners are the perfect solution for city water. The Premier Series includes many models to meet your home’s water treatment needs.
Specialty Solutions
Specialty solutions are sometimes needed to treat specific issues. Kinetico offers Dechlorinators and Chloramine Reduction Systems to eliminate unwanted disinfectants as well as other specialty filters to handle specific concerns with your water.
Your water utility is required to provide a water quality report detailing what’s in it, but to better understand your water’s quality, you should have the water in your home tested. All Kinetico water professionals offer free in-home water testing. Find your Kinetico water expert here to schedule a water test.
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