Where these numbers come from

Last reviewed: September 12, 2026

Every hardness figure on this site traces back to the City of Georgetown's own published data. We do not run a lab. We do not test your tap. We read what the utility publishes and we do the arithmetic in front of you.

The two pages we use

City of Georgetown Ask GTX knowledgebase article 20398, updated May 8, 2026: https://georgetowntexas.qscend.com/askgtx/knowledgebase/article/20398

That article is where the plant by plant hardness comes from. Water from Lake Georgetown and the Southlake plant is listed at 176 to 178 mg/L as calcium carbonate. Water from the Park plant and the Southside plant is listed at 309 to 320 mg/L.

City of Georgetown water utility reports: https://georgetowntexas.gov/utilities/water/resources/water_utility_reports/

That hub is where the utility posts its regular reporting.

The other numbers on that same city page

The city publishes these as system ranges. They are not readings for your address and we do not present them that way.

Calcium 44.8 to 95.5 mg/L. Magnesium 11.5 to 19.7 mg/L. Sodium 20.4 to 30.4 mg/L. Sulfate 29 to 38 mg/L. Total dissolved solids 284 to 419 mg/L. Alkalinity 133 to 270 mg/L.

The classification scale

Soft is 0 to 60 mg/L. Moderately hard is 61 to 120. Hard is 121 to 180. Very hard is anything above 181.

That is the USGS scale. It is not our scale and we did not adjust it.

Converting mg/L to grains per gallon

One grain per gallon is about 17.1 mg/L. That is the whole conversion. We show it so you can check our work rather than take our word for it.

What we will not do

We will not average the two plants into a single citywide number. Averaging 176 and 320 produces a figure that describes nobody's house.

We will not use national roll up sites that publish one hardness number for Georgetown. Several of them do. Those numbers match neither plant band, and we have no idea what they were derived from.

We will not knock on your door, and we will not run a countertop test in your sink and call it a lab result.

We will not take money from a water treatment company to move them up a page or into a result. Paid placement does not exist on this site, in this section or any other.

We will not tell you your water is unsafe. Hardness is a scale problem. Compliance and contaminant reporting is the city's, and it is published on the pages linked above.

When we do not know

Some addresses cannot be pinned to one plant from published information. When that happens we say so and show both bands rather than picking one to make the answer look cleaner.