Streetsboro water, read closely from our own town

Streetsboro is our town

Bedrock Water is based in Streetsboro, so this is our own town’s water. We read its 2025 report front to back.

The hardness figure gets one short bullet. The rest of the report says more than people expect. Every figure here’s printed in that report, except the USGS hardness scale and one division we mark as ours.

Where the water comes from

Streetsboro buys its water from Portage County Water Resources. The report calls it groundwater from a Portage County well field. The city says it mainly receives its water from the Shalersville water treatment plant, where it is “filtered, treated, and then softened before distribution to our community.” The Streetsboro water tower and two other towers carry it around town.

Portage County also has emergency links to Cleveland, Ravenna and Tallmadge, all of them surface water systems. The report says there was no need to use them in 2025, and that the city “received no water from these entities.”

Softened once, and still hard

The city is under contract with Portage County to have the water softened before it enters the community. Even so, the average hardness for 2025 was 148 ppm.

The report defines one ppm as one milligram per liter. The USGS calls 121 to 180 mg/L hard, stated as calcium carbonate. The report doesn’t print that basis. It’s the usual one, and read that way the softened water still lands in the hard band. Divide 148 by 17.1, the standard calcium carbonate conversion, and you get about 8.7 grains per gallon. That division is ours. The city prints ppm only.

The report calls hardness “a quality issue, not a safety concern.” And it says: “Some households choose to install water softeners to reduce scaling and improve appliance efficiency.”

The county side of that story is on our Portage County water page.

Three sections name the water heater

The water heater turns up in three parts of the report.

The hard water section says soft water helps water heaters, washing machines and plumbing fixtures last longer.

The faucet tips name it twice. Particles in a faucet screen could be plastic from the hot water heater dip tube. White scale on faucets and showerheads may come from calcium carbonate, and the report gives two answers: “Clean these fixtures with vinegar or use water softening to reduce the calcium carbonate levels for the hot water system.”

The section on flushing mains asks you to avoid tap water while the city flushes near you. If you must use it, run the cold tap for a few minutes and skip the hot, so sediment doesn’t settle in your hot water tank.

We agree with the city’s split. Vinegar is a fine answer for a showerhead. The inside of a water heater is the part a cloth can’t reach.

What the city tested itself

The results table has two sets of columns, headed City of Streetsboro and Portage County.

The city took 216 routine bacteria samples in 2025, and all of them came back negative. The report adds that its tests show no fecal coliform.

The city says its distribution system has no lead service lines, no galvanized lines requiring replacement, and none whose lead status is unknown. At the tap, the city column shows lead not detected, with 0/30 sites above the action level.

Copper did show up. The 90th percentile was 0.57 ppm against an action level of 1.3 ppm, and no site went over. The table names corrosion of household plumbing as one typical source.

City column, county column

Set the disinfection rows side by side and the two columns differ. Chlorine read 1.13 ppm in the county column and 0.99 in the city column. Total trihalomethanes, a byproduct of disinfecting with chlorine, read 39.6 ppb for the county and 44.85 ppb for the city. Haloacetic acids, another byproduct, read 10.5 and 12.5 ppb. All are under their limits of 4 ppm, 80 ppb and 60 ppb, and the table shows no violation.

The report doesn’t explain the gap, or say where the county’s samples were taken. Our guess, and it’s only ours, is time in the pipes. Chlorine keeps reacting as water moves through mains and towers, so less of it’s left and more byproduct forms. The report does say water quality “can deteriorate in areas of the distribution mains over time,” and that flushing helps remove stale water.

None of this calls for equipment. We list it because a report that prints its supplier’s numbers beside its own lets you check one against the other.

What we would do in Streetsboro

Test at your own tap first. The 148 ppm is the city’s average for the year, and your house is one address on that system.

If your result lands near the city’s, the county has already done part of the softening. A home softener here finishes that job rather than starting it, which usually means a smaller unit than the same house would need on unsoftened water. We size it from the grains we measure at your tap and from your household, not from a chart.

If the only complaint is white crust on one showerhead, the city’s vinegar tip may be all you need, and we’ll say so. The free water test tells you which kind of house you have.

For the rest of the county, see what we do in Portage County.