Well Water Treatment in
Houston, TX and Surrounding Areas
From Culligan of Houston

Because your water heater may be making it. Texas A&M’s well owner guide lists the reaction between a magnesium anode rod inside the heater and sulfate in the water as one of the three sources of hydrogen sulfide, alongside decaying organic matter in the aquifer and bacteria acting on pyrite. If both taps smell, the source is the well. If only the hot tap does, the heater is worth looking at first. Either way it is fixable, and sulfur filtration handles the well side of it.

A softener removes hardness, which is calcium and magnesium, and it can handle a limited amount of iron and manganese along the way. If iron is your main problem, you want a dedicated iron filter. A test tells us which situation you’re in.

Less often than you might expect, and we would rather say so than sell you a filter you don’t need. Across the Texas Water Development Board’s samples of the Chicot and Evangeline aquifers, median dissolved iron sits around 0.1 mg/L against a 0.3 mg/L standard, and median manganese is well under its 0.05 mg/L standard. Those are medians though, not a promise about your well, and staining is a local problem wherever it happens. If you are seeing orange in the tub, your well is above the median and a test will show by how much.

It depends where your well is and how deep it goes. Shallower wells in the northern counties tend toward harder, calcium-rich water and often want softening. Deeper wells toward the coast are often softer already and are better served by reverse osmosis for drinking water. Sulfur can show up in either. We test before we recommend.

Not from a softener. A properly functioning water softener will never make your water taste salty, because the sodium it adds is far too little to taste. If your well water tastes salty before any treatment, that is the aquifer, and it points toward sodium and dissolved solids rather than hardness.

Through ion exchange. As it removes the calcium and magnesium that make water hard, it replaces those ions one for one with sodium. The amount added is proportional to how hard your water is, and in most cases it isn’t a significant contributor to the sodium in your diet.

Yes. Once a softener is installed it begins removing the scale that hard water built up. It takes a long time to clear, but it will clear.

Other than salt or potassium chloride, no. A softener reduces the cleaning supplies and detergents going down your drain, which makes it a net positive environmentally.

Modern softeners recharge based on how much water you use and how hard it is. Most of our customers add salt once or twice a year.

Probably less than the headlines suggest, at least here. Arsenic is a real issue in the Gulf Coast aquifer, but the Texas Water Development Board locates the high-arsenic samples in the southwestern part of the aquifer, around Duval, Webb, Live Oak, Karnes and Jim Wells counties, and ties them to south Texas uranium deposits. Those are two hundred miles from the Houston area. Arsenic has no taste, color or smell, so if you want certainty for your own well it is a simple add-on to a test panel.

Test it for bacteria before you drink from it, and do not count on chlorination alone. The post-Harvey study of 8,822 private wells across 44 Texas counties found coliform at 1.5 times the normal rate and E. coli at 2.8 times, worse in wells that had been underwater, and found chlorination did not consistently clear it. Only about 4 percent of the potentially affected wells were ever tested.

No, and this catches people out. The Lone Star Groundwater Conservation District requires even exempt domestic wells in Montgomery County to be registered, and the Harris-Galveston Subsidence District permits wells while exempting most single-family household wells under a five-inch casing. Both agencies exist to manage how much water comes out of the ground, because of subsidence. Neither tests what is in it.

Iron, manganese, sulfur and hardness are aesthetic and nuisance problems at the levels we usually find. Safety questions like bacteria and nitrate are a separate test and worth doing on any private well, more so after flooding or if you are near agriculture or an older septic system. Start with a water test and we’ll tell you honestly which category your results fall into.

Most residential systems install in a few hours in a single visit. We deliver the equipment, install it, and set it up, so there’s nothing for you to unbox or assemble.

As soon as the well is drilled and tested. Roughing in space and plumbing for treatment during construction costs far less than retrofitting it into a finished home.

Every recommendation we make starts with knowing what is in your water. The test is free, it happens at your house, and it takes about half an hour. You’ll get your numbers explained in plain language and an honest answer about whether you need treatment at all.