Whole House Water Softeners in Lake Dallas

Lake Dallas took its name from the reservoir Dallas built here in the 1920s, which served as that city’s main water source for 31 years before the larger Garza-Little Elm reservoir, now Lewisville Lake, covered it in the 1950s. The town itself, which had been French Settlement and then Garza, incorporated in 1965 after a nine-year legal fight among residents, and it has never run a water plant of its own. Since 1963 the Lake Cities Municipal Utility Authority has supplied Lake Dallas, Shady Shores and Hickory Creek together as one system. The federal facility record puts three 800 gallon a minute pumps and a 177,000 gallon ground tank at the West Lake station, a 1,500 gallon a minute station with a half million gallon ground tank on FM 2181, and a 250,000 gallon elevated tank at the authority’s office, which sits at 501 North Shady Shores Drive in Lake Dallas.

The authority’s 2025 report describes a supply with two faces. Several of its old wells are abandoned or plugged, three wells near the West Lake pump station still operate, and the rest is treated surface water bought from the Upper Trinity Regional Water District, the Denton County wholesaler created in 1989, which treats Lewisville and Ray Roberts lake water at its Tom Taylor plant in Lewisville. The report’s source table names them: wells 4, 6 and 8 at the West Lake pump station operational, wells 1, 2, 2A, 3 and 5 abandoned or plugged, and two connections to Upper Trinity’s regional plant, under a first line saying the authority purchases surface water. Upper Trinity’s Tom Taylor plant can treat 70 million gallons a day and uses ozone mainly for taste and odor, and the district’s output swings from about 15 million gallons a day in winter to above 60 in summer as irrigation rises. The two faces do not match on hardness. Wells in the deep sandstone under Denton County yield soft, sodium-rich water; the neighboring Mustang district’s wells in the same Trinity and Woodbine formations printed under 6 ppm of hardness in 2025. Lake water carries the calcium and magnesium it gathers from the watershed, and the treated lake water North Texas districts deliver is generally described as moderately hard. A tap in Lake Dallas may see either, or a blend, depending on which source is running and where the home sits relative to the West Lake station.

The authority’s report does not print a hardness figure that we could read, so we do not have one for Lake Dallas and do not borrow Upper Trinity’s or Mustang’s in its place. The report’s 2025 tables run to chloramines, lead and copper, nitrate and disinfection byproducts sampled at three Lake Dallas addresses, 501 North Shady Shores Drive, 611 Shore and 613 Sargent, and the Upper Trinity page it reprints lists the district’s lake water as Lewisville and Chapman lakes with no hardness line either. For a town whose water is sometimes well and sometimes lake, a single published number would mislead anyway. The free water test tells you what your own tap carries, in ppm and grains per gallon, and that result decides both whether a softener earns its keep in your house and how many grains it needs to handle.

Sources: Handbook of Texas: Lake Dallas, TX · Texas House bill analysis, H.B. 4176 · LCMUA 2025 Water Quality Report · Upper Trinity Regional Water District — Water Sources · Mustang SUD 2025 Consumer Confidence Report, secondary constituents table · U.S. EPA Envirofacts SDWIS: water system facilities for TX0610029 · Lake Cities Municipal Utility Authority: home page · Upper Trinity Regional Water District: Water Treatment and Delivery