Whole House Water Softeners in Carrollton

Carrollton does not treat its own water. It contracts with the City of Dallas, and much of that supply comes down the Elm Fork of the Trinity River, the stream that runs along Carrollton’s western edge. Dallas moved its intake upstream to the Elm Fork at Record Crossing Dam in 1896 and built Lake Dallas in 1928, its first reservoir outside Dallas County; that lake was absorbed into Lewisville Lake in 1957. Dallas today draws on the Elm Fork and on lakes Fork, Grapevine, Lewisville, Ray Hubbard, Ray Roberts and Tawakoni, and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality rates the combined system superior. One of Dallas’s three plants stands inside Carrollton: the Elm Fork Water Treatment Plant at 1440 Whitlock Lane, built in the 1950s, which a 2015 Dallas memorandum rated at 300 million gallons a day and a 2014 presentation at 320, the second largest of the three. Carrollton takes its finished water through a single Dallas connection in the federal facility record and moves it with its own pumps and tanks: ground storage at Old Denton Road, Country Club Drive and Josey Lane and elevated tanks at Hutton Drive, Hebron Parkway, Marsh Lane and Josey Lane, with one well at the Country Club site kept only for emergencies.

Because the water is Dallas water, the best published guide to its hardness is Dallas’s own. A December 1, 2023 memorandum to the Dallas City Council gave Dallas Water Utilities’ hardness as 120 to 155 mg/L as calcium carbonate, which is 7 to 9 grains per gallon, from the top of moderately hard at 120 into hard above it on the USGS scale. That is a range for the whole Dallas system on the dates the memorandum covered, not a Carrollton measurement, and Dallas treats water at more than one plant from more than one lake, so the figure at a Carrollton tap depends on which plant is feeding the Elm Fork side on a given day. Carrollton’s own report does not print a hardness figure we could read, so this page does not claim one for the city. Dallas’s own pages add the chemistry behind the range: all of its supply is surface water, none from wells, lime is among the chemicals its plants use in treatment, and Dallas calls its water non-corrosive. Its system is large and interconnected, 900 million gallons a day of treatment capacity across the three plants, 18 pressure planes, 23 storage tanks and 30 pump stations by its own water delivery summary, a system Dallas says is built for operational flexibility.

What the Dallas range does tell a Carrollton homeowner is the neighborhood of the problem: moderately hard at the bottom of the range and hard above 120, enough to scale a water heater and spot every glass, and steady enough across the year that a softener sized for 9 or 10 grains per gallon will not run short. Within Carrollton the elevated tanks set the pressure by neighborhood while the minerals ride along unchanged from the Dallas plant, so a home near Hebron Parkway and one near Hutton Drive see the same water at different pressures. The free water test turns the Dallas range into your number, in ppm and grains per gallon, measured at your kitchen tap, and that is the figure we size and set the softener to.

Sources: Handbook of Texas: Carrollton, TX · City of Carrollton: Water Quality · Historical marker ‘Water for Dallas’ · Handbook of Texas: Lewisville Lake · City of Dallas memorandum, December 1, 2023 · City of Dallas memorandum, May 15, 2015, Elm Fork Water Treatment Plant residuals basin · Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, project TABS2023007633, Elm Fork WTP Filters Complex Phase 1 · Dallas Water Utilities presentation to the 2014 SAME Dallas Post Infrastructure Forum · U.S. EPA Envirofacts SDWIS: water system facilities for TX0570034 · Dallas Water Utilities: Water Quality Information · Dallas Water Utilities FY25 fact sheet · Dallas Water Utilities: Water Delivery, Distribution, Pumping and Water Quality Divisions