Whole House Water Softeners in Wilmer

Wilmer's water has been sold twice before it reaches the city. The 2024 consumer confidence report says Wilmer buys from the City of Lancaster, and Lancaster buys treated surface water from Dallas, and it locates the Dallas sources, the Elm Fork of the Trinity and six lakes, Ray Roberts, Lewisville and Grapevine on the Elm Fork side and Ray Hubbard, Tawakoni and Fork on the East Side plant's side, in Dallas, Hunt, Rains and Wood counties. The report calls Dallas Water Utilities Wilmer's treated water supplier and says the data it prints combines Lancaster's results with the information Dallas provided. It notes that all three Dallas treatment plants are optimized and certified under the Texas Optimization Program, and that Dallas, Lancaster and Wilmer each hold a Superior rating from the TCEQ. Dallas's December 2023 memorandum names those plants and their lakes: East Side in Sunnyvale for Hubbard, Tawakoni and Fork, and Elm Fork and Bachman for the water the Elm Fork brings from Ray Roberts, Lewisville and Grapevine. Nowhere in the 2024 report is a Wilmer well; the supply it describes is purchased surface water and nothing else. EPA's facility list for PWS TX0570018 settles the well question: wells at 231 1st Street and at Millers Ferry and Swanger are carried as inactive, as is an emergency tie to Hutchins, leaving the Lancaster connection as the only active source for 2,724 connections and 7,296 people.

The hardness of that water is Dallas's figure, because no one between Dallas and Wilmer changes it. The 2023 memorandum's range for the Dallas system is 120 to 155 mg/L as calcium carbonate, which works out to about 7 to 9 grains per gallon, and under the USGS scale (hard is 121 to 180 mg/L) that is hard water across the range. Wilmer's report prints Dallas's 2024 results: fluoride averaging 0.629 ppm, barium 0.04 ppm, aluminum 0.006 ppm and manganese 2.7 ppb, the last two marked as secondary standards, and total organic carbon averaging 3.27 ppm. Barium, aluminum and manganese are minerals the lakes contribute, but none of them is a hardness mineral; by the USGS definition hardness is dissolved calcium and magnesium only. Those two do not appear anywhere in the report, and Wilmer's own columns cover disinfection by-products, nitrate, chlorine residual and copper. So this page gives no Wilmer number. Page 2 of the report records a 2022 copper result of 0.1437 ppm at the 90th percentile, no site over the action level.

What the two handoffs do change shows up in Wilmer's own results. Total chlorine residual in the city's pipes averaged 1.36 ppm in 2024 with a range of 0.62 to 2.55, and the disinfection by-products measured in Wilmer were 16 ppb for total trihalomethanes and 9 ppb for haloacetic acids, both under their limits. Residual and by-products shift with distance and time in the pipe; calcium and magnesium do not, so the water at a Wilmer tap carries the same minerals it left the Dallas plant with, after passing through Lancaster's system and then the Wilmer water tower pictured on the report's cover. That tower is one of several: active storage in the federal record is at Pinto Road (a 1 million gallon ground tank, a 0.5 million gallon elevated tank, four 800 gallon per minute pumps), at Fulghum (0.25 million gallons ground, 0.25 elevated) and a 0.30 million gallon elevated tank at Millers Ferry, roughly 2.3 million gallons in all. A softener sized for 9 grains per gallon covers the top of Dallas's range, and the free water test gives the exact figure at your own tap.

Sources: City of Wilmer 2024 Consumer Confidence Report · City of Dallas memorandum to the Quality of Life, Arts and Culture Committee, December 1, 2023 · USGS Water Science School: Hardness of Water · EPA Envirofacts SDWIS, Water System record for TX0570018 · EPA Envirofacts SDWIS, Water System Facility table for TX0570018: active consecutive connection SW from Lancaster