There are three things a water company can put in your house, and around here the right one depends almost entirely on where your water starts. Get that right and you notice the difference the first morning.
Three different waters across our service area
Between Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts, homes fall into roughly three camps, and each one has a system built for it.
1. On a reservoir supply: filtration and reverse osmosis
Providence Water draws on the protected Scituate Reservoir and serves around 600,000 Rhode Islanders. The MWRA supplies Boston, Brookline, Newton, Quincy, Milton, Norwood, Stoughton, Framingham, Natick, Weymouth, Needham, Wellesley, Canton, Dedham, Southborough and Northborough from the Quabbin and Wachusett reservoirs. Both are low-hardness surface supplies.
Good water leaving the plant — and then a long journey. Every public supply is disinfected, as it has to be, so there is chlorine in it when it reaches you. And soft, low-alkalinity water is more aggressive to plumbing than hard water is, in a region carrying a great deal of old unlined iron main and older service lines. Providence Water has been dosing orthophosphate since January 2021 for corrosion control and is replacing every lead service line in its system by 2033.
So on the mains the upgrade is carbon filtration plus reverse osmosis at the kitchen tap. Chlorine gone, dissolved solids gone, and it is the change people comment on within a day — in the coffee, in the ice, in a plain glass of water.
2. On town groundwater: the whole-home system
Not every town here is on a reservoir. North Kingstown, South Kingstown, Narragansett and Westerly pump town groundwater. Every town on Cape Cod — Barnstable, Bourne, Falmouth, Mashpee and Sandwich — draws from the sole-source aquifer beneath it.
Groundwater carries whatever rock it sits in, and in New England that means hardness and iron. This is where a whole-home softener earns its place, and where people feel it everywhere at once: no scale in the kettle or on the shower door, no spotting on glassware, no orange staining in the laundry, and soap that finally rinses off. Pair it with a carbon tank for chlorine and the whole house changes.
3. On a private well: the full build
Plenty of homes beyond the mains are on their own bedrock well. Same hardness and iron, plus two things a town supply would have handled for you.
A rotten-egg sulfur smell is hydrogen sulfide, and it has to be oxidised out before anything else touches it. And the Rhode Island Department of Health asks private well owners to test for arsenic, uranium and radon, all of which occur naturally in the region's bedrock. A well build is usually oxidising filtration, then softening, then UV, then reverse osmosis at the sink — in that order, because a softening resin bed fouled with iron is an expensive thing to replace.
Finding out which you are
Put your ZIP into the tool on our home page: it names your supplier, where your water comes from, and which system fits it. Then call us and we will confirm it for your house and give you a price. We measure at your own tap, you watch the result, and you finish knowing exactly which system fits your house and what it costs.