The honest softener page for a soft-water city
Water Softener Installation in Scranton
Here is the thing most softener companies will not tell you in Scranton: Pennsylvania American Water’s supply tests officially soft by the utility’s own published numbers — roughly 1.3 to 2.8 grains per gallon. If you are on city water in the Hill Section, Green Ridge, or West Scranton, a softener is usually the wrong buy. Head up into the Abingtons or out toward North Pocono and the wells flip that story. The free test tells you which water you have before anyone quotes a tank.
We install softeners in the Scranton area every week — almost always on wells in Clarks Summit, Dalton, Moscow, and the townships above the valley, where hardness commonly runs high and iron rides along with it. Inside the city, the complaints are chlorine taste and sediment after main work on anthracite-era pipes, and those are carbon and sediment jobs, not resin. We measure your grains per gallon at the kitchen tap and tell you plainly which lane you are in.
Why Scranton city water usually does not need a softener
The valley’s municipal supply comes from mountain reservoirs, not limestone aquifers, and the utility’s consumer confidence reports put hardness in the soft range. Scale on a Scranton fixture is more often dried mineral from a low-flow aerator than true hardness. When a homeowner on city water tells us a competitor quoted a softener from the zip code alone, we test first — and most of the time the honest answer is to skip it and put the money toward carbon for chlorine or a kitchen RO for the lead question that pre-1986 housing raises.
Where the softeners actually go: the Abingtons and North Pocono
Cross the city line into Clarks Summit, Clarks Green, Dalton, Moscow, or Elmhurst and you are largely in well country. Those wells commonly test hard — often 7 grains per gallon or more — and many carry dissolved iron that stains tubs orange. That is where a correctly sized softener, sometimes paired with an iron filter, changes daily life. Sizing is grains per gallon times household water use, measured, not estimated from a neighbor’s system.
Sound familiar?
Problems this system solves
Chlorine taste on city water
Carbon fixes chlorine. A softener does not touch it.
Pre-1986 plumbing
Lead solder was legal until 1986. One kitchen-tap test, RO if needed — separate from softening.
The payoff
Why NEPA homeowners choose this system
An honest no on city water
If your tap reads soft, you hear skip the softener — in writing.
Sized from your well reading
Grains per gallon, household size, flow — not an Abingtons average.
Iron and pH read at the same visit
So the softener is never asked to do a filter’s job.
City and mountain, one local crew
Scranton, Dunmore, the Abingtons, North Pocono — same technicians, same test.
Good to know