What's actually in your water, by community.

Fountain (Fountain Utilities)

Fountain is the clearest hard-water case in our service area, and the City says so itself. Fountain publishes recommended water softener settings on its own website: 165 ppm (10 grains) in winter, 350 ppm (20 grains) in summer. The swing happens because Fountain runs surface water from Pueblo Reservoir alone from November through April, then blends in city wells from May through October.

If your softener is set once and forgotten, it is wrong half the year. That seasonal adjustment is part of our service plan.

Security & Widefield

We are going to be straight with you about this one, because you have been lied to before.

PFAS from decades of firefighting foam use at Peterson reached the Widefield aquifer and was first detected in municipal wells in 2013. The CDC's exposure assessment found residents in this area with PFHxS blood levels up to 6.8 times the national average. That happened, and it is not in dispute.

It has also been addressed. Security Water District brought an ion exchange treatment plant online in April 2021 and reports no detections above 2.0 ppt since. Widefield built its Southmoor treatment plant and its most recent report shows no PFAS detected. We are not going to tell you your water is poisoned to sell you a system. If you want a point-of-use barrier at your kitchen sink anyway, that is a completely reasonable thing to want after what this community went through — and reverse osmosis is the right tool for it.

Private wells — Falcon, Peyton, Black Forest, Calhan, Ellicott, Yoder

If you are on a well, every published average in the world is useless to you. A groundwater study of the Upper Black Squirrel Creek basin measured hardness across 50 wells at 7 to 510 mg/L — that is 0.4 to 29.8 grains per gallon, with an average around 6.5 gpg. The spread is the finding.

Well water also brings issues city water doesn't: nitrate, iron, and in the Denver Basin bedrock aquifers under Black Forest and north Falcon, manganese and radon. There is no such thing as a standard well system. There is only a tested well.

Pueblo & Pueblo West

Pueblo Water publishes its hardness directly: 238.4 mg/L, or 13.9 grains per gallon. That is roughly eight times Colorado Springs' mountain water. This is the part of our service area where a whole-home softener does exactly what the brochure says it does — less scale on fixtures, longer water heater life, less soap.

Pueblo also disinfects with chloramine rather than free chlorine. Chloramine is more stubborn than chlorine and needs a properly sized catalytic carbon bed to reduce, not a basic carbon filter. If you keep fish, chloramine must be removed before the water goes in the tank.

Pueblo West is a separate utility with its own reservoir shares and treatment plant. It does not publish a hardness figure, so we test.

Monument, Triview, Palmer Lake & Castle Rock

North of Monument you are drinking Denver Basin aquifer water, and it behaves nothing like Colorado Springs' snowmelt. Castle Rock Water reports hardness averaging 121 mg/L — about 7.1 grains — with individual results ranging from 67 to 239 mg/L (3.9 to 14 gpg) depending on which of its five plants serves you.

The radionuclide picture is the one worth understanding. Triview Metropolitan District has publicly described installing enhanced treatment at both of its plants specifically to remove radium, after elevated radium at a neighboring district. Its 2021 point-of-entry quarterly average was 4.16 pCi/L against a 5.0 limit. These systems are in compliance and treating for it — but if you want a second barrier at the tap, reverse osmosis is the one that reduces radium.

Woodland Park, Cripple Creek, Victor & Teller County

The City of Woodland Park publishes hardness of 60 to 110 mg/L — 3.5 to 6.4 grains per gallon. Moderate. A softener is a judgment call here, not an obvious yes.

What stands out is radium. Woodland Park reported combined radium-226/228 averaging 3.83 pCi/L with a high sample of 5.1, against a limit of 5.0. The system is in compliance — compliance is judged on the average, not a single sample — but that is the tightest margin of any published figure in our service area, and it is the honest reason to consider reverse osmosis at the kitchen sink here.

Woodland Park also runs two separate entry points into its distribution system, so what reaches your house depends on where you live in town. Cripple Creek, Victor and the surrounding acreage are a mix of small systems and private wells — we don't publish numbers we can't source, so those get tested.