Whole House Water Softeners in North Richland Hills

North Richland Hills takes finished water from two wholesalers and runs it through a single distribution system. The city's utility operations page lists about 379 miles of mains, five booster pump stations, three of them at the wholesale points of entry, 4 elevated and 4 ground storage tanks holding a combined 16.5 million gallons, and 2,175 fire hydrants, and it names two wholesale suppliers of drinking water: Fort Worth on one hand and the Trinity River Authority on the other. Fort Worth's own 2017 service area study puts the Fort Worth share of the city at 64 percent, and the authority's own brochure counts portions of North Richland Hills among the areas its Tarrant County Water Supply Project has served since 1974, with Lake Arlington as that project's source. The 2025 report adds that the city is also able to use well water but seldom needs to, and it records 94,446,757 gallons of system water loss for the year. The federal facility inventory names the hardware: three Fort Worth connections and one from the authority's Tarrant County project; booster stations on Western Center, Conn Drive, College Hill, Johnson and Stanley Keller Road; ground tanks of 5.0 million gallons at College Hill, 2.0 at Conn and Western Center and 1.5 at Johnson; and elevated tanks of 2.0 million gallons on Shady Grove Road and Bursey Road and 1.5 on Amundson Road. All five potable wells are flagged for emergency use only. The 2020 budget adds that of the Fort Worth water bought in fiscal 2019, 0.774 billion gallons was resold to Watauga, and the average daily draw from Fort Worth was 6.299 million gallons.

Because two suppliers feed the system, the report's secondary constituents table is a compilation of both entities' sampling with the highest results shown, and the hardness line reads 108 to 150 ppm of hardness as calcium carbonate, 6 to 9 grains a gallon. The seams between the two supplies show in the other rows: total alkalinity 81 to 124 ppm, where 81 is the authority's single February sample and 124 is Fort Worth's top; sulfate 17.30 to 48.90 ppm, with the authority's 48.9 at the top; conductivity 312 to 342 micromhos; calcium 37.60 to 48.10 ppm, printed to two decimals as the city's table has it; dissolved solids 182 up to 244 ppm. The authority's own hardness result for 2025, printed in its customer cities' reports, was 110 ppm, which sits inside Fort Worth's range, so the two supplies overlap rather than pull apart. USGS puts 108 and 110 in moderately hard territory and 150 in hard.

Which supply reaches which side of the city is not something the report or the utility page states, and with three points of entry and tanks on both sides of the system the water in any one neighborhood can be Fort Worth's one week and the authority's the next, or a mix in the mains between them. The practical effect is small, because both supplies are lake water of similar character, with the authority's 110 ppm sample and Fort Worth's 108 to 150 range describing one band, moderately hard shading into hard. A softener here should be sized to the 150 ppm end, 8.8 grains per gallon give or take, so the unit is right no matter which entry point is feeding your street; the free water test shows which water your street is drinking on the day.

Sources: City of North Richland Hills, 2025 Water Quality Report · City of North Richland Hills: Utility Operations page · Trinity River Authority, 2025 brochure · Trinity River Authority: Tarrant County Water Supply Project · City of Bedford, 2025 Water Quality Report · City of Fort Worth, Water Impact Fee Update · USGS Water Science School: Hardness of Water · EPA SDWIS via Envirofacts REST, water system facility records records for PWS TX2200063 · City of North Richland Hills, FY2020 Approved Budget