Akron water hardness, four to nine grains per gallon

Akron already tells you the number

Most water questions on this site start with nobody having measured anything. This one is the opposite. Akron publishes its hardness every year, in both units, and you can read it yourself.

The 2025 report puts the average at 107 mg/L, or 6 grains per gallon. The 2024 report put it at 118 mg/L, or 7 grains. Both years reported the same range: 4 to 9 grains per gallon.

That gap between the two years matters more than it looks. The average moves. The range didn’t. If someone sizes a system off a single number they read once, they’re sizing off the part that changes.

What “moderately hard” actually means

The USGS sorts hardness into bands. Water between 61 and 120 mg/L is moderately hard. Akron’s 107 mg/L sits inside that band, near the top of it.

The USGS also describes what hard water does: soap scum, more detergent, scale in a water heater and in pipes. Those are real and they’re the reason softeners exist. But the USGS doesn’t set a complaint threshold, and neither will we. It doesn’t say that 107 mg/L is the line where a house needs equipment.

The part a salesperson won’t lead with

Four to nine grains isn’t a lot.

A softener is sized by how many grains it removes between regenerations, and the capacity you need is your hardness multiplied by the water your household uses. At Akron’s hardness, that arithmetic lands lower than the units most often quoted in this market. Some houses on Akron water don’t need a softener at all. Some need a much smaller one than they were about to buy.

We would rather say that on a page than discover it in your basement after you have signed something. If you want the number for your own house rather than the city average, that’s what the free water test is for — and if it comes back at 5 grains, we’ll tell you so.

Alkalinity and pH, since the report prints them

Akron reported alkalinity at 77 mg/L, ranging from 45 to 101, and pH at 7.4, ranging from 7.0 to 7.9.

We’re listing those because they’re in the report, not because we’re going to build an argument on them. Anyone who reads a pH of 7.4 to you and then explains why it requires a product is telling you a story the city’s own document does not support.

Who is actually on Akron water

Akron’s distribution division serves city residents plus Fairlawn, Mogadore, a portion of Hudson and Copley, and the Joint Economic Development Districts in Bath, Copley, Coventry and Springfield Townships. It also supplies Stow and Tallmadge on a wholesale basis. Around 300,000 people in total.

That’s worth knowing for a practical reason: if you live in Stow or Tallmadge, the hardness figures above are yours too. Tallmadge’s own 2025 report reprints the identical 107 mg/L and 6 grains per gallon, which is a useful thing about public documents — you can check one against another.

When the water wasn’t Akron’s

In 2025 Akron used the Medina County backup supply for 57 days while it rehabilitated a water storage tank, and sent 51.3 million gallons to a portion of the Montrose area.

Akron states plainly that its report doesn’t cover the quality of the water it received from Medina County. So we won’t tell you what that water’s hardness was. Nobody published it, and the honest answer to a number nobody published is that we don’t know it.

What it means practically is narrower and more useful: a softener is a machine tuned to a set point. If yours was dialled in for Akron water and the supply changed underneath it for two months, the setting it’s running now was chosen for water it wasn’t treating. That’s worth a recheck, and a recheck isn’t a purchase.

If it turns out you do want one, the sizing argument above is the whole of our water softeners page, and Bedrock Care is what keeps a valve set correctly after it’s in.