Well Water Treatment in
Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania and
West Virginia From Culligan Stoner

Almost nothing, and the state says so itself. Pennsylvania has no statewide construction or siting standards for private water wells. There is no state permit and no required test. The one state requirement is that the driller hold a license from the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, and DCNR is candid that the license does not imply the driller knows proper drilling or well construction practice. Its own conclusion is that protecting and maintaining a private well is the homeowner's responsibility. A handful of counties and municipalities have written their own ordinances, so it is worth asking locally.

Maryland is the strictest of our four states, and it is still a one-time check. Before a well is approved as a potable supply, state regulation requires two consecutive samples free of coliform bacteria collected at least 24 hours apart, compliance with the nitrate limit, and a turbidity standard. Your county health department is the approving authority and can require more where it has reason to think something else is present. After approval, nothing recurring is required.

One bacteria sample. Virginia's private well regulation requires a bacteriological sample collected after the well has been disinfected and flushed, before the well goes into use. No nitrate, no chemical analysis, nothing over the life of the well, and nothing required when a property is sold. Virginia is a buyer-beware state on well water, so if you are buying a house on a well, testing is on you.

A permit from your local health department and a licensed driller, both required before drilling, modifying or abandoning a well. The completion sampling rule, two samples for total coliform and E. coli, applies where a variance from the setback requirements was granted rather than to every well. Your local health department will run a voluntary test for a fee, which is worth doing.

Bacteria, nitrate and turbidity, once, in the states that ask for anything at all. Not one of the four requires a test for hardness, iron, manganese or pH. Those are what scale a water heater, stain a tub, corrode copper and shorten the life of every appliance you own, and no state on our map has ever looked at them in your well.

Because town water here is usually river water and your well is limestone groundwater. Chambersburg treats water from the East Branch of the Conococheague Creek and reports hardness around 10 ppm, about half a grain. Harrisonburg blends the Dry River and the North River and averages 66 mg/L. USGS puts the carbonate aquifers under these valleys near 280 mg/L, roughly 16 grains. Hard water is a groundwater problem, and the cities here mostly do not drink groundwater.

Copper, pulled out of your own plumbing by acidic water. That is the signature of the crystalline rock east and southwest of the valley, where the median pH runs about 6.7. A study of 701 Pennsylvania private wells found 18 percent below pH 6.5, but earlier work cited alongside it found 59 percent were corrosive to metal plumbing. The pH number understates it badly. Same study: lead above the standard in 12 percent of wells statewide and 17 percent in the southcentral region, all of it from plumbing rather than the aquifer. A blue-green stain is a plumbing bill waiting to happen, and neutralizing the pH is the fix.

No, and this is where the two halves of our territory need different answers. Soft acidic water needs pH correction, not softening. Adding a softener to water that is already soft solves nothing and leaves the corrosion running. On the limestone side the reverse is true. A test settles it in half an hour, and our blog post on whether well water needs a softener walks through the reasoning.

More common than most people expect, and more so on the limestone. The USGS sampled 50 wells in the limestone aquifers of Berkeley County, West Virginia and found at least one type of bacteria in 64 percent of them and E. coli in 32 percent. Two thirds of the contaminated wells had no treatment on them. The Pennsylvania study of 701 private wells found total coliform in 33 percent and E. coli in 14 percent, and DNA source tracking pointed mainly at animal sources rather than septic systems.

Less than you would hope in karst. In that Berkeley County study, total coliform showed up at similar rates in shallow and deep wells. What depth did change was severity: the highest E. coli and fecal coliform concentrations came from the shallow wells. Water moves through limestone along fractures and solution channels rather than filtering through sand, so depth is not the barrier it is in other kinds of rock.

Yes, and more so if you are near poultry houses, dairy or orchards. An analysis of roughly 19,000 private well samples across Virginia found about 6 percent above 5 mg/L and 1.3 percent above the 10 mg/L limit, with Rockingham County at the top of the list of counties exceeding it. Albemarle, Roanoke, Montgomery, Page and Shenandoah counties all appear in the 5 to 10 mg/L group. The authors are clear that those numbers undercount, because the sampling is voluntary rather than systematic.

It is a real finding in the crystalline rock, with a caveat attached. USGS reported that water from nearly one in four drinking water wells sampled in the Piedmont and Blue Ridge crystalline aquifers exceeded 4,000 picocuries per liter. That threshold is a proposed alternative standard rather than an enforced limit, EPA has never finalized a radon rule for drinking water, and the wells in that network were a mix of household and public supply. It is worth a separate lab test if you are on crystalline rock, and it is not something we would sell you a system for without one.

Nothing in the data we can find supports making that claim for this footprint. The Pennsylvania survey found arsenic above the standard in 2 percent of private wells, concentrated in the northern part of the state rather than our end of it. No uranium figures exist for this region that we could source. We would rather tell you that than put a scare on a page.

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.

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 on 16 grain valley water a system works harder than on softer mountain water.

Most residential systems install in a few hours in a single visit. We deliver the equipment, install it, and set it up, so there's nothing for you to unbox or assemble.

Test before you close, because no state we operate in will do it for you and Virginia has no disclosure requirement at sale at all. At minimum get bacteria and nitrate, and add hardness, iron, manganese and pH so you know what treatment the house needs before you own it rather than after.

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.