Nobody publishes how hard your water is.
We’ll tell you what fixes it.

Nobody publishes it. We read all five annual water quality reports for this area and not one of them contains a hardness figure — hardness is not a regulated contaminant, so the state's report template has no row for it. Any confident grains-per-gallon number you find online for your town did not come from your water utility. What is published is the source: Morgantown treats Monongahela River water, Fairmont treats the Tygart Valley River, and Clarksburg treats the West Fork, with Bridgeport buying Clarksburg's finished water. Those are three different rivers, so one answer could not cover them anyway. Call or fill out the form, tell us what you are seeing at home, and we will tell you which system fits and what it costs.

Almost certainly not. EPA's treatment records list free chlorine for every system in this area and no chloramination at any of them, and chloramine appears in only one of nearly 5,000 treatment records in the whole state — at a system in the eastern panhandle. It is worth knowing because free chlorine comes out with ordinary activated carbon. If somebody tries to sell you a more expensive catalytic carbon system on the grounds that you have chloramine, they are describing a different market.

Iron and manganese, first. In the USGS survey of West Virginia groundwater, iron was over the federal secondary standard in 57 percent of samples and manganese in 62 percent. Those are what stain a bath orange and laundry gray. Hardness second, and it varies enormously — USGS wells in these five counties have come back anywhere from 13 to 339 mg/L. If you are near old mine workings it is worth a closer look: USGS found roughly double the hardness and around ten times the iron in wells downgradient of reclaimed mines, though it also found the effect mostly gone beyond a thousand feet and in wells deeper than 150 feet. Bacteria is the other one, and it needs a lab to check.

No. Hard water is a nuisance, not a health hazard, and we are not going to tell you otherwise. It shortens the life of water heaters, spots glassware, stiffens laundry and leaves soap on your skin. Anybody selling you a softener on the basis that hard water is making your family ill is selling through fear.

The systems serving this area treat to federal drinking water standards and publish their results every year, and on the most recent reports they are in compliance. Meeting the legal standard is a different question from tasting good or being kind to your plumbing, and those are the problems we actually solve. We are not in the business of telling you your town's water is unsafe.

Not on its own, and this is the most common mistake we expect to have to correct. A softener uses ion exchange to remove calcium and magnesium. Iron, manganese and hydrogen sulfide are different problems needing a filtration stage ahead of the softener — put a softener in front of a well with real iron in it and you will foul the resin and be disappointed. Which stages you need depends on your well and what you are seeing — call or fill out the form and we will tell you.

Call us at (304) 435-9812 or fill out the form. Tell us whether you are on city water or a well and what you are seeing — scale, staining, a smell, a taste — and we will tell you which system fits your home and what it costs. If it sounds like you do not need anything, we will say so — for a new company a customer who felt sold to is worse than no customer at all.