If you are outside the mains anywhere around Derby, Andover, Rose Hill, Mulvane, Goddard, Maize, Clearwater or the country edges of almost every town we work in, your water is coming out of the ground under your own land.
That is not a problem in itself. Plenty of Kansas well water is perfectly good. The problem is that nobody has looked at yours, and here is the sentence that should decide what you do next.
KDHE does not require you to test, and no utility is doing it for you
A city water system is tested constantly and has to publish the results. A private well is tested when the owner decides to test it, and never otherwise.
KDHE and K-State Research and Extension both recommend testing every year for coliform bacteria and nitrate, and every one to three years for the nuisance minerals that change more slowly. Use a KDHE-certified laboratory, particularly if the result might ever matter legally.
Nitrate is the one to take seriously
The federal and state limit is 10 mg/L as nitrate-nitrogen. Nitrate has no taste, no smell and no color. You cannot tell by drinking it.
This is farm country, and that is where nitrate comes from — fertilizer, feedlots and septic systems moving down into shallow groundwater. The Kansas Geological Survey's Sedgwick County sampling found nitrate from zero to 567 ppm, and attributed the worst readings to farm wells with inadequate casing letting surface water straight in. Your well's construction matters as much as your geology.
Now the part that costs people money
A water softener does not remove nitrate.
Softening is ion exchange. It swaps calcium and magnesium for sodium, which is how it stops scale, spotting and the film in your shower. It is very good at that job and it is the wrong tool for this one. Carbon filtration, which handles chlorine, taste and smell, is also the wrong tool for this one.
We will say that even though it is the cheaper sale, because the alternative is a customer who believes they are protected and is not.
What actually works
Reverse osmosis at the kitchen sink. It pushes water through a membrane fine enough to hold back nitrate and dissolved solids, and it treats the water you drink and cook with — which is the water that matters for this particular problem.
That is why, on a well, reverse osmosis is part of the answer rather than something brought up at the end of a sales call.
The order of operations
- Test first. Not a sales demonstration with a drop bottle — a real laboratory test, including the things a softener cannot fix. If you have never had the well tested, that is the whole job for now, and it is a job you can do without hiring anybody.
- Treat iron and sulfur before softening. Iron fouls softening resin. If there is iron in the water and it goes into the softener untreated, the softener's life gets shorter and nobody tells you why.
- Soften for the scale. That is the part you can feel, in the shower, on the glassware, and in how long the water heater lasts.
- Reverse osmosis for what the rest cannot touch. Nitrate, dissolved solids.
One more thing worth knowing before anyone quotes you
On a well, the pump, the pressure tank and the treatment all have to be sized together, because treatment adds pressure loss. A system specified without looking at what is already in your well house is how a house ends up with soft water and no pressure.
Which is a long way of saying: have somebody look at it. The assessment is free and it stays free whether you buy anything or not.
Sources. K-State Research and Extension MF3655, Testing Private Water Systems, and KDHE private well guidance. Kansas Geological Survey, Geohydrology of Sedgwick County, 1965. Both are linked from our Your Water page.