Water Softener Installation & Repair

Lakeland water is hard, the city publishes how hard, and the figure is lower than most of what you will read online. Start here.

Yes, Lakeland has hard water, though not as hard as the internet claims. City of Lakeland Water Utilities draws its raw water from wells averaging about 750 feet into the Floridan Aquifer, and at that depth the water has spent a long time in contact with limestone, which is calcium carbonate. It dissolves the rock on the way through and delivers the calcium to your house.

The city publishes the numbers. In its water quality data, finished water from the Combee treatment plant tested at 108 mg/L total hardness with 74 mg/L calcium hardness, and finished water from the Williams plant tested at 126 mg/L total hardness with 91 mg/L calcium hardness (City of Lakeland Water Utilities, 2023 figures). Converted to the grains per gallon that softener equipment is rated in, that is roughly 6 to 7.5 grains per gallon, which lands in the moderately hard to hard band.

That is worth stating plainly because you will see much higher numbers quoted for Lakeland online, sometimes 20 to 30 grains per gallon. We could not verify that against any City of Lakeland source, and 20 to 30 grains would work out to well over 340 mg/L, far above what the city reports for treated water. Sizing a system off an inflated hardness number means paying for capacity you do not need.

If you are on a private well rather than city water, none of the above applies to your tap. A private well is untreated, so your hardness, iron, and sulfur numbers are your own, and the only way to know them is a test.

Hardness across our service area comes from the same source, which is why the symptoms look the same from Lakeland to Winter Haven to Davenport. Every municipal system in the region pulls from the Floridan Aquifer and every one of them is treating limestone-derived calcium.

We publish a real number only where the utility publishes one. For Plant City, Zephyrhills, and the other communities we serve, we would rather test your tap than quote a figure we cannot source, and the number that actually sizes your system is the one measured at your house anyway.

We test your water for free, in your home or business, before we recommend anything. The test gives us your grains per gallon, which sets the resin capacity your system needs, and it flags iron or sulfur odor that a plain softener will not fix.

Sizing a softener without a test is guessing. Undersize it and the resin exhausts before the next regeneration and you get hard water at the end of every cycle. Oversize it and you paid for capacity you will never use and the system regenerates less efficiently. Call (863) 667-6364 or book the water test online.

Pick ion exchange if you want hardness actually removed, salt-free if you want to stop scale without adding sodium, and reverse osmosis if the goal is drinking water quality rather than whole-house scale control. They are three different jobs and homeowners routinely buy the wrong one.

The distinction that trips people up most is that a salt-free system is a conditioner rather than a true softener. It changes the crystal structure of the minerals so they stop sticking to surfaces, but the minerals are still in the water, so you will not get the slick, sudsy feel a salt-based unit gives you. For a household that mainly wants to stop scale and skip the salt hauling, that trade is usually worth it.

Use the table below to sanity check the bids you receive. What moves your real number is your measured hardness, your household size, where the unit has to go, and whether there is a drain within reach of the brine tank.

We give you a firm price before any work begins, based on your tested hardness and your actual install location. Nothing starts until you have approved it, and we do not send a technician to quote a system without testing the water first.

New installations carry a one-year workmanship warranty, and manufacturers typically provide a five-year warranty on the head, excluding seals, and a 10-year warranty on the fiberglass tank. Financing on approved credit is available, and True Home Membership members get priority scheduling and no dispatch fees.

A softener that stopped producing soft water is usually repairable, and the most common causes are cheap to fix. Before anyone sells you a new system, the salt level, the brine tank, and the control valve should all be checked, because a large share of the calls we run come down to one of those three.

The clearest tell is a salt bridge, which is a hard crust that forms across the top of the salt in the brine tank with an air gap underneath. The tank looks full, but no brine is being made, so the resin never regenerates and hard water starts coming through. Break the bridge and the system works again.

The visible damage from hard water is cosmetic and the expensive damage is hidden. Spots on glass and film on tile are annoying, and removing hard water stains from shower glass and removing rust and mineral deposit stains will handle the surface. What you cannot see is scale narrowing supply lines and coating the inside of your water heater.

That last one is where the money goes. Sediment collects at the bottom of a tank and insulates the burner from the water above it, so the unit runs longer for every shower and fails years before it should. Softening the water is one of the cheapest ways to protect a heater, whether that means repairing the one you have or getting more life out of a new water heater installation. How hard water could be harming your home covers the rest of the damage, and in older houses that have been scaling for decades, repiping is sometimes the honest recommendation.

Any of the following is a good reason to have the water tested and a plumber take a look.

We install and service water softeners throughout Lakeland, Plant City, Winter Haven, Zephyrhills, Wesley Chapel, Davenport, and the surrounding Polk County, eastern Hillsborough County, and southeastern Pasco County communities.

Start with the free water test. Call (863) 667-6364 and we will tell you what is actually in your water before anyone talks to you about equipment.