Well Water Treatment in
Jacksonville, Gainesville and Surrounding Areas
From Culligan of Jacksonville

Not as a state. There is no statewide requirement for a water quality test when a well is completed, none when a property changes hands, and none on any schedule afterward. The Department of Health states it directly: the state of Florida does not have a requirement for well sampling when private homes are sold. The one local exception in our service area is Duval County, which is among twelve Florida counties whose local rules require testing of newly constructed wells. Everywhere else here, testing is entirely voluntary.

A coliform bacteria and nitrate test every year, and a lead test every three years. That is guidance rather than a rule, and nothing sends you a reminder. About 12 percent of Florida residents get their water from a private well or a limited use system, and none of those systems get the monitoring a public utility gets.

The water management district, or a county acting under delegation from it. The St. Johns River district covers the eastern counties and the Suwannee River district covers the west. Worth knowing that in the Suwannee district the licensed well contractor pulls the permit rather than the homeowner, so many owners never handle the paperwork and may not know what was or was not tested.

Hydrogen sulfide gas. Where the Floridan Aquifer is confined, which is most of the eastern half of this service area, the groundwater is anoxic, carrying under half a milligram per liter of dissolved oxygen. Sulfate-reducing bacteria thrive in exactly that condition and produce the gas. No agency publishes a figure for how many Florida wells are affected, so we will not quote one, but the chemistry behind it is well documented. Sulfur filtration removes it.

No, and this is the one safety point worth making about sulfur water. At higher concentrations hydrogen sulfide deadens your sense of smell, so a stronger problem can read as a milder one. Measure it rather than sniffing it.

Very hard, and that is a class rather than a number. The Floridan is limestone and USGS mapping puts most of this part of the state above 180 mg/L, the threshold for the very hard category. You will see specific grain figures quoted around the internet for Jacksonville. We have not been able to verify any of them against a primary source, so we are not going to repeat one. Your own number takes about half an hour to measure and is the only one that matters for sizing a softener.

USGS sampling of Upper Floridan drinking water wells, most of them private homes, found iron above the secondary standard in 15 percent of them and manganese in 4 percent. Iron and sulfur frequently travel together in this aquifer, which is why one system often handles both.

Less than you might think. In that same USGS sampling of Floridan drinking water wells, chloride exceeded its secondary standard in 2 percent and dissolved solids in 5 percent. Mineralized water does exist at depth in eastern Duval County, but the study that documented it sampled deep aquifer wells for aquifer management rather than household wells, and found most samples were more than 99 percent fresh water. Chloride can run higher near the coast and a test will tell you, but it is not the everyday north Florida well problem.

Yes, and more so in the western counties. Only one of 161 Floridan drinking water wells USGS sampled exceeded the 10 mg/L limit, so a serious result is uncommon. But 23 percent were above 1 mg/L against a natural background near 0.1, and the highest concentrations turned up where the aquifer is unconfined in north central Florida, which is the Gainesville, High Springs, Fort White and Live Oak side of our territory. About half of Upper Floridan spring samples exceed Florida's springs criterion of 0.35 mg/L.

For nitrate, yes. Monitoring wells in the shallow surficial sand aquifer showed 16 percent above the 10 mg/L nitrate limit against almost none in the deep Floridan, and manganese was three times more common there too. Read that with a caveat: monitoring wells are placed to find problems, so they run higher than household wells would. Still, a shallow well has less rock between it and the surface, and it deserves a closer look.

Not in this part of Florida. The USGS reconnaissance that established Florida's radium picture found the exceedances concentrated in the phosphate districts to the south, with Polk County carrying most of them. Northeast Florida was largely not part of that story. The one caveat worth stating: Hamilton County, out at Jasper and Jennings, does host phosphate mining and did register some results, so a well out there is worth a check. Elsewhere in our area we would not sell you a radium system.

Arsenic is close to a non-issue in the Floridan, with under 1 percent of samples above the limit. Radon is the one radionuclide with a real signal here: USGS found it exceeding health benchmarks more often than any other constituent it measured, with about 3 percent above the proposed 4,000 picocurie limit. That limit is a proposal rather than an enforced standard, since EPA never finalized a radon rule for drinking water. It is worth a separate lab test if you want certainty, and aeration is the treatment.

The Navy is offering free private well testing for PFAS near NAS Jacksonville, Naval Station Mayport and Outlying Landing Field Whitehouse. If you are in one of those areas, take them up on it. Results have not been published in any detail, Florida has no state limit for PFAS, and the federal limits apply to public utilities rather than private wells. We would rather point you at the free test than guess.

No. A properly functioning water softener will never make your water taste salty. The small amount of sodium added is far too little to create a salty taste.

Through ion exchange. As it removes the calcium and magnesium that make water hard, it replaces those ions one for one with sodium. The amount added is proportional to how hard your water is, and in most cases it isn't a significant contributor to the sodium in your diet.

Yes. Once a softener is installed it begins removing the scale that hard water built up. It takes a long time to clear, but it will clear.

No. Softening and sulfur removal are different jobs. A softener handles hardness; the rotten egg smell needs aeration or an oxidizing filter, and the right choice depends on how much iron comes with it. Most well homes here run both, which is covered on our post about softeners for well water.

Modern softeners recharge based on how much water you use and how hard it is. Most of our customers add salt once or twice a year, and limestone water works a system harder than soft water does.

Sulfur, iron and hardness are nuisance problems at the levels we usually find here. Bacteria and nitrate are health questions and each is a separate test, worth running yearly as the state recommends. Start with a water test and we'll tell you honestly which category your results fall into.

Every recommendation we make starts with knowing what is in your water. The test is free, it happens at your house, and it takes about half an hour. You'll get your numbers explained in plain language and an honest answer about whether you need treatment at all.