Portage softens your water before it reaches you

Somebody already softened it

This is the unusual thing about Portage County, and almost nobody who lives here knows it.

Streetsboro doesn’t soften its own water. Its annual report says the city is under contract with Portage County to have the water softened before it ever enters the community. Somebody has already run your water through a softening process before it reaches your meter.

And it still arrives at 148 ppm.

The USGS calls anything from 121 to 180 mg/L hard. So the water Portage County softens on your behalf lands inside the hard band anyway. Divided by the standard 17.1 conversion that’s about 8.7 grains per gallon — and we want to be clear that the conversion is our arithmetic, not a figure the city published.

That isn’t a criticism of the county. Central softening is expensive and utilities soften toward a target that balances cost, corrosion control and distribution chemistry across thousands of homes. It’s simply a fact worth knowing before someone tells you your water is fine because the county treats it.

Kent publishes both sides, which is rare

Kent runs its own plant and softens there. Its report prints the annual average before and after: 304 mg/L raw, 101 mg/L treated. Calcium falls from 93 to 20. Magnesium falls from 17 to 13. The pH goes from 7.35 to 9.19.

We’re pointing at this because it’s unusually honest reporting and because it shows the size of the job. Kent’s raw water is very hard by the USGS scale. What comes out is moderately hard — 101 mg/L sits in the 61 to 120 band.

So Kent’s treated water is genuinely softer than what Streetsboro receives. Two towns, twelve miles apart, on different arrangements, with different answers.

Whose water is it

Portage County Water Resources runs on groundwater. All of it. The county draws from 12 wells across the Shalersville, Brimfield, Mantua and Suffield areas, and operates three public systems: Portage County, Mantua Village and Rivermoor.

Aurora’s report adds the piece the county’s own document leaves out: the Shalersville plant supplies Aurora, Streetsboro and Shalersville Township, and it uses ion exchange to soften. That’s the same mechanism a home softener uses, running at municipal scale.

Aurora is the strangest case in the county. It runs two separate public water systems inside one city. Part of Aurora drinks Lake Erie water bought from Cleveland; part drinks Portage County groundwater from the Shalersville wells. In 2025 the city moved zero gallons between them. Two houses on opposite sides of Aurora can be drinking water from sources sixty miles apart.

Ravenna is the outlier on the other side. It’s the county’s surface-water system, drawing from Lake Hodgson on Lakewood Road and distributing 537 million gallons in 2025. Seasonal algae is treated with powdered activated carbon, and the city notes its use “is minimized to contain costs.” No algal toxins were ever detected in finished water.

The byproduct spread, which follows from all of that

Because Ravenna treats surface water and everyone else treats groundwater, the disinfection byproducts diverge.

Ravenna’s HAA5 running annual average was 38.1 ppb against a 60 ppb limit — no violation, comfortably under. The Portage County system’s was 10.5. That’s a roughly three-and-a-half-fold spread inside one county, and it’s a straightforward consequence of source water, not of anyone doing a bad job. Surface water carries more organic material for chlorine to react with. That’s what surface water does.

If your water tastes of chlorine in Ravenna and doesn’t in Brimfield, that’s why.

Lead, which is mostly good news here

Streetsboro reports no lead service lines, no galvanized lines requiring replacement, and no unknown-status lines, with lead non-detect at all thirty sample sites. Both Aurora systems report none. Portage County Water Resources and Rivermoor report none, with lead non-detect at their sample sites too. Ravenna’s ninetieth-percentile result was 3.7 ppb against a 15 ppb action level.

One exception, and we would rather name it than leave it out: the Mantua system’s distribution inventory does list service lines designated as galvanized requiring replacement. Mantua’s own lead result was still non-detect at every sampled site. A pipe designation isn’t a lead finding.

We’re spelling this out because Portage is the structural opposite of Cuyahoga. In Cleveland the pipe between the main and your house is the whole question. Here it mostly isn’t, and anyone selling you a lead filter in Streetsboro on a Cleveland argument is selling you the wrong county’s problem.

What we would actually do here

Test at your tap, because the county average is a plant-side number and yours is one address on a distribution system.

If you’re on Portage County water, the honest starting point is that the county already softens it and it’s still hard. A home softener here is doing the last part of a job somebody else started, which usually means a smaller unit than a salesperson quoting from a chart would put in your basement. Size it from a real grain figure, not from the assumption that untreated water is arriving.

If you’re in Ravenna and the complaint is taste, that is a carbon question rather than a softener question, and the two get confused constantly.