Ames sits on some of the hardest raw water in Iowa. The state's own sample database records 420 mg/L at Ames Well #28 and 470 mg/L at Well #30 — roughly 24.6 and 27.5 grains per gallon. Then the city's lime softening plant takes most of it out before the water reaches your house. Which changes the whole conversation here.
Kind Water Co installs and services water softeners, whole-home carbon filtration, reverse osmosis drinking-water systems and well water systems in Ames, and we repair and service existing softeners, whoever put them in. Installation is handled by licensed local plumbing professionals we vet, schedule, and stand behind.
We come to Ames. The free in-home test measures hardness, iron and TDS at your own tap. The first 50 miles of travel are free, then $1 a mile, and any travel charge is quoted before you agree to anything.
The test decides what, if anything, you need: a softener, reverse osmosis, both, or nothing. If your water doesn't call for it, we'll tell you so and leave you the readings.
Every price below includes equipment, installation, taxes and a lifetime parts warranty:
To start, book your free in-home water test or get an instant quote.
| Ames at a glance | What the record shows |
|---|---|
| Who supplies the water | The Ames Water Treatment Plant, run by the City of Ames, PWSID IA8503039, serving 55,177 people in EPA SDWIS against a 2024 Census city estimate of 69,026 |
| Where it comes from | Municipal wells feeding the city's own plant — Ames buys nothing and produces everything it distributes |
| Softened at the plant | Yes. EPA SDWIS treatment records carry the softening objective with lime softening, lime treatment and recarbonation with carbon dioxide, alongside coagulation and sand filtration |
| Published hardness | Raw water 420 mg/L as calcium carbonate at Well #28 and 470 mg/L at Well #30 — 24.6 and 27.5 grains per gallon, per the Iowa DNR Drinking Water Portal, analyte 84. These are well samples, not what comes out of your tap |
It matters enormously which side of the plant a hardness figure came from. Third-party “water hardness by city” tables rarely say, and they routinely quote raw-well numbers as though they were tap water. In Ames that is a 24-to-27 grain claim about water you will never drink.
What the state database actually shows is a city with genuinely brutal source water and a lime plant that deals with it. Lime softening reduces hardness substantially without eliminating it — that is the nature of the process, and no Iowa utility claims otherwise. So the honest Ames position is: your raw water is among the hardest in the state, your finished water is not, and the only number that decides what you need is the one measured at your kitchen sink. Our Iowa water hardness by city guide covers how thin and how often misquoted the published record is.
Sodium at Ames measured 8.8 mg/L on 4 June 2025 — among the lowest readings anywhere in the central-Iowa set. For comparison, Knoxville, pulling from 2,300 feet down in the Jordan sandstone, runs 137 mg/L, and Newton, another lime-softening alluvial system, runs 56.5 mg/L.
That is a genuinely useful distinction. Lime softening removes calcium and magnesium as a precipitate; it does not swap them for sodium the way an ion exchange plant does. Ames is the clean end of that spectrum. If you have been reading about sodium in softened municipal water, Ames is not the city where that applies.
Ames has an unusually mixed housing stock for a city its size — older near-campus homes, mid-century neighbourhoods, and new build on the edges — and the water heater in a 1960s house has been quietly collecting whatever the plant left behind for sixty years. That is where a test earns its keep. What arrives at the meter and what arrives at the tap in a specific house are not always the same thing, and plumbing age is the usual reason.
Because the plant already softens, most Ames installs start at the kitchen sink. Every price is all-in: equipment, installation, taxes and a lifetime parts warranty.
For drinking water, see our reverse osmosis guide for Ames.
Annual maintenance is $199 a year for a tank-RO home and $249 for a tankless-RO home. A full diagnostic service call is $199; a known-issue trip is $99 plus the part. We offer 0% financing, and $100 off for military and first responders. Ask for the written breakdown before you schedule, or start one through our instant quote.
Outside the Ames service area, rural Story County homes draw private wells from the same formations the city's wells tap — without the lime plant in between. That means the full raw hardness, plus whatever iron and bacteria the well carries, arriving untouched. Our well water setup is a dual-tank system at $3,450, or $3,800 with tank RO, with UV disinfection at $700 and sediment pre-filtration at $500 when the readings call for them. We fit tank RO rather than tankless on a well, because high dissolved solids cost a tankless unit its pressure. Start with free well water testing.
We are licensed and insured, and our softeners are built from NSF/ANSI 44 certified components and our reverse osmosis systems are certified to NSF/ANSI 58. Installation is handled by licensed local plumbing professionals we vet, schedule and stand behind. Pricing is published and all-in, so the figure you read here is the figure on the paperwork. Distance and site conditions are the only things that can change it, and we tell you before you agree.
If someone has quoted you a softener in Ames on the strength of a 24-grain figure, ask which side of the plant that sample came from. We come to you, measure hardness, iron and the rest at your own kitchen sink, and leave you the readings and a written quote at no charge, whichever way you decide. Book your free in-home water test.
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The Iowa DNR sample database records 420 mg/L as calcium carbonate at Ames Well #28 and 470 mg/L at Well #30, which is 24.6 and 27.5 grains per gallon. Those are raw well samples. Ames runs a lime softening plant, so the water reaching your tap is substantially softer than those figures, and no finished-water number is published.
Yes. EPA SDWIS treatment records for PWSID IA8503039 carry the softening objective with lime softening, lime treatment and recarbonation with carbon dioxide, plus coagulation and sand filtration. Ames produces all of its own water rather than buying any, so every drop passes through that plant.
Because lime softening removes calcium and magnesium as a precipitate rather than swapping them for sodium the way ion exchange does. Sodium at Ames measured 8.8 mg/L on 4 June 2025, among the lowest in central Iowa. Knoxville, on deep Jordan sandstone, runs 137 mg/L by comparison.
Sometimes, and less often than in an unsoftened town. Lime softening reduces hardness substantially without eliminating it, so scale still forms, just more slowly. Because no finished-water hardness figure is published for Ames, the only way to answer this for your house is a reading at your own tap.
A standalone Kind Water Co reverse osmosis system is $800 for the tank model and $900 tankless, all-in with equipment, installation, taxes and a lifetime parts warranty. Paired with a softener the package is $2,850. RO systems are certified to NSF/ANSI 58, with 0% financing and $100 off for military and first responders.
Every number on this page comes from a public record. Here is where to open each one yourself.
Whole-home water softening, filtration, and reverse-osmosis drinking water — professionally installed and built to last a lifetime.
Serving Marion, Cedar Rapids & surrounding Linn County communities
Kind Water Co is a d/b/a of Zero Cap Investments LLC · 2258 Bison St, Apt B, Marion, IA 52302
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