The Importance of Water Filtration in Northeast Ohio Homes

Most homes in the suburbs around Cleveland and Akron are on municipal supply, which arrives treated and disinfected. Head out toward Hinckley, Bath, Valley City or Columbia Station and private wells become common, and a well delivers whatever is in the ground under the property, untreated.

So the complaints split two ways. On city water people call about hardness and the taste and smell of the disinfectant: soap that will not lather, film on glassware, scale on the shower head and the kettle, and a taste at the kitchen tap that makes a household start buying bottled water. On a well it is iron staining in the tubs and laundry, a sulfur smell, and hardness on top of both.

The house is the variable, not the street. Two homes on the same block can behave differently at the tap because of what is behind their walls. A 1950s colonial in Parma that has never been repiped and a new build in Avon draw the same water and deliver a different glass of it.

Point-of-entry treatment protects everything downstream. That is the argument for treating where the water enters the house rather than at one faucet: the water heater, the dishwasher and the plumbing itself are what scale actually costs you, long before anyone notices the glassware.

The straight answer is that nobody can tell you what your house needs without testing your water. That is where we start.