Aurora water comes from Lake Erie or from wells

Two reports bound into one

Aurora’s yearly water report reads like two reports stapled together. Most of its tables come in pairs. The first pair belongs to the suppliers, Portage County and Cleveland. The rest belong to Aurora’s own two systems, the Aurora Cleveland system and the Aurora Portage system. They’re separate public water systems, run by the same city, and they don’t carry the same water.

The Cleveland system buys Lake Erie water from Cleveland Water. The city says that water serves the majority of Aurora residents.

The Portage system is groundwater. It comes from a well field on Coit Road and is treated at Portage County’s Shalersville plant. The report says that plant uses ion exchange to soften the water. That’s the same method a home softener uses, run at the size of a town. The report adds that Portage County supplies Aurora, Streetsboro and Shalersville Township from that plant.

The pairs don’t match

Because the systems are separate, the report prints separate results. For a homeowner, that’s the most useful thing in it. The numbers below come from Aurora’s own system tables, not the supplier tables, which print different figures.

Take chlorine, which is added to keep bacteria out on the way to your tap. The average left in the water was 0.886 ppm on the Cleveland system and 1.383 ppm on the Portage system. The limit is 4 ppm.

Chlorine byproducts went the other way, lower on the Portage side. The report tracks two groups of them. On the Cleveland system they came in at 43.7 and 16.65 ppb. On the Portage system they came in at 34 and 10 ppb. The limits are 80 and 60 ppb.

Lead was sampled 30 times on the Cleveland system and 5 times on the Portage system. No sample on either was over the action level.

Every one of those results met its limit. We list them for a narrower reason. “Aurora water” isn’t one thing. Two houses in the same city can have a different source, a different amount of chlorine and different byproducts.

If your complaint is a chlorine taste, the Portage side carried more on average in 2025. Taste is a carbon question. Keep it apart from hardness, which is a softener question.

The link between them

The two systems are joined by an auxiliary connection. In 2025 the city used 0 gallons from it. The report says that, on average, it’s used for about one day a year.

So for all but about a day a year, your house drinks from one system. On a day the connection is used, that may not hold. The report doesn’t say which way the water flows, so we won’t guess.

What the report leaves out

Aurora’s 2025 report prints no hardness figure for either system. We read it end to end, and it isn’t there.

Two other reports come close, and each needs care.

Cleveland Water’s own 2025 report prints its hardness as 105-130 ppm, with an average of 117. It prints that once, for Cleveland’s whole system, not plant by plant. Aurora’s report shows results from two of Cleveland’s four plants, Baldwin and Nottingham. So it’s the nearest published figure, not a reading of Aurora’s own water. The USGS calls 61 to 120 mg/L moderately hard. Cleveland’s average sits just inside that band. The top of its range doesn’t.

On the Portage side we found no published number for Aurora at all. Streetsboro’s report prints 148 ppm as its average for the year, and Aurora’s report says the same plant supplies both cities. We still won’t call 148 Aurora’s number. Streetsboro’s report printed it, for Streetsboro. Aurora printed nothing.

So the honest answer to “how hard is Aurora water” is that it depends on the system. One side has a supplier’s number. The other side has none.

Find your system before anyone sizes anything

The report prints a service-line lookup for each system. The simplest way to find out which system you’re on is to ask the city’s Utilities Department, whose number is in the report.

Then test at your tap. A softener is sized from your hardness and the amount of water your house uses. A number from the wrong system sizes it wrong.

On the Portage side, the water has already been through a softening plant. So a home softener, if you need one at all, is sized for what is left. On the Cleveland side, the supplier’s average sits near the line between moderately hard and hard, and some houses will decide they need nothing. Either way, the free water test measures your own tap, whichever system feeds it. If the number comes back low, we’ll say so.

Lead, briefly

Buying Cleveland’s water doesn’t mean buying Cleveland’s pipes. Our Cleveland page is about lead picked up on the way to the tap: from a lead service line, old solder or brass fixtures. Aurora’s water reaches you through Aurora’s own distribution systems. The report says neither of them has lead, galvanized requiring replacement, or unknown-status service lines.

That covers the pipe from the street. It doesn’t cover old solder or brass inside a house. For the rest of the county, see what we do in Portage County.