Well water testing in Portage, Medina and Lake counties

We aren’t going to invent numbers for your county

Geauga County has a published USGS study of domestic wells. Portage, Medina, Summit, and Lake don’t have an equivalent, and we aren’t going to borrow Geauga’s figures and imply they describe your water. Groundwater varies over short distances — your neighbor’s results don’t reliably predict yours, let alone a study from the next county.

What we can tell you is what this region’s geology commonly produces, what the state recommends testing for, and what the results actually mean. The rest comes from a sample of your water.

The baseline panel

OSU Extension’s guidance is specific and worth following. At a minimum, a private well should be tested every year for total coliform bacteria, nitrate, pH, and total dissolved solids. Those four are inexpensive and tell you whether you have good water or a problem that justifies more specific testing.

Beyond the annual four, worth doing at least once:

• Arsenic — health-based, invisible, and impossible to detect without a lab.
• Iron and manganese — the usual cause of staining, and the most common finding in this region’s wells.
• Hardness — the number that determines whether a softener is justified and how it would be sized.
• Sulfur / hydrogen sulfide — the rotten-egg smell, if you have it.

Test again whenever something changes: the taste, the smell, the color, work done on the well, flooding nearby, or a new baby in the house.

What we commonly see, stated as what it is

Across the wells we look at in this region, the recurring problems are hardness, iron and manganese staining, and hydrogen sulfide odor. Those are nuisance and aesthetic issues — real, worth fixing if they bother you, and not health findings. Bacteria and nitrate are the health-relevant results that show up occasionally, and they’re exactly why the annual test exists.

That’s as specific as we can be until we’ve measured your water.

Where to get water tested

If you would rather not involve a company at all, that’s a legitimate choice and OSU Extension publishes guidance on finding a laboratory yourself. Your county health department also handles private water system permits and often offers bacteria testing directly.

If you would like us to do it, the in-home test is free, we send the health-related samples to a certified laboratory, and you keep the results whether or not you buy anything.

What that visit involves is on the water test page. The equipment a private well most often needs, when it needs any, is on well water systems.