Water Treatment
Services in
Fort Lauderdale, FL

The Biscayne Aquifer is the City's only source. It's a shallow limestone aquifer, close enough to the surface that land use above it can reach the wells, and Florida's 2025 source water assessment counted 19 potential contamination sites near the City's wells, rated moderate susceptibility. Wells feed the plants, the plants soften and filter the water, and chloramine is added before it goes into the pipes.

Fiveash, opened in 1953, used lime to drop calcium out of the water, then filtered it. It handled hardness well but not the dissolved organic matter that colors water and feeds disinfection byproducts, and it wasn't built to stop PFAS. Peele-Dixie pushes water through nanofiltration membranes, the same family of technology as reverse osmosis, which is why its water tested clean for PFAS and had less color. The Prospect Lake Clean Water Center, built at the City's Prospect wellfield, is rated for 50 million gallons a day and pairs nanofiltration with ion exchange for color removal.

If you live near the city limits, check your water bill: neighboring cities run their own utilities, and some of them buy water from Fort Lauderdale. The name on the bill tells you which report applies to your tap.

The yellow or tea-colored tint comes from tannins, natural compounds from decaying plant matter that the aquifer carries. The City has long said the colored water was safe to drink, and its reports back that up, but it shows in white tubs and toilet bowls and makes a glass of water look unappealing. Lime softening at Fiveash left much of that color in. When a contractor damaged the raw-water line feeding Peele-Dixie in May 2024, Fiveash supplied those neighborhoods too, and the City warned residents the water would look slightly different.

With the new plant online, water leaving the plant should be clear. Water experts interviewed by the South Florida Sun Sentinel cautioned that older iron, steel and concrete mains could still tint it on the way to some homes, while the City says its system is intact and is spending about $54 million on pipe replacement from 2023 to 2028. If your water still runs yellow or brown after the switch, run the cold tap and note whether it clears; a test tells us whether the color is coming from your street or from inside the house, and whole-house carbon filtration handles most of what's left.

EPA's nationwide UCMR 5 program sampled both City plants in 2023. Fiveash's May sample measured 16 ppt PFOS, 4.9 ppt PFOA, 13 ppt 6:2 FTS and smaller amounts of six other PFAS. Peele-Dixie's May and November samples had none of the tested compounds above EPA's reporting limits. EPA set 4 ppt limits for PFOS and PFOA in 2024, with compliance due in 2029, and has proposed extending that to 2031.

Membrane treatment is a recognized way to reduce PFAS, which is why the Peele-Dixie results came back clean and why retiring Fiveash should lower PFAS in City water. The City hadn't published PFAS results from the Prospect Lake plant at the time of writing, so for now the improvement is likely but not yet shown in published data. If you'd like certainty for drinking and cooking water now, reverse osmosis at the kitchen sink is designed to reduce PFOS and PFOA no matter which plant is feeding your neighborhood that week.

City water here is softened at the plant, so for many homes a softener is optional. Membrane water from Peele-Dixie and Prospect Lake usually reaches the tap with little hardness left; lime-softened Fiveash water carried more. Because the City doesn't publish a hardness number, we measure it in grains per gallon at your sink and tell you plainly if it's low enough to skip a softener.

A softener still earns its place in homes with heavy spotting on glass shower doors, crusted aerators or a water heater that's already scaling up. In those cases we size the unit from your own reading, since a citywide figure doesn't exist.

If the smell bothers you most, start with whole-house catalytic carbon. Chloramine is in all City water whichever plant made it, and carbon takes care of showers, laundry and the kitchen at once. It also helps with any leftover color picked up in older mains.

If PFAS is your concern, an under-sink RO system is the direct answer. It doesn't depend on which plant serves your street, on how quickly the City publishes new results, or on EPA's compliance date.

If you're thinking about a softener, test first. With the water now mostly membrane-treated, a lot of homes won't need one, and we'd rather tell you that than sell you a tank you don't need. The full three-stage setup is for homes whose test shows all three issues.

The city was incorporated in 1911 and grew up around 165 miles of inland waterways, the reason it's called the Venice of America. Neighborhoods along the New River and south of downtown, such as Riverside Park, Tarpon River, Harbordale and Edgewood, have many houses built well before 1986, when lead-based solder was banned for drinking water plumbing. The City's own inventory of roughly 70,000 service lines found almost no lead pipe, so in these homes the joints and fixtures inside the walls are what to test. We arrange a certified lab lead test at no charge; the sample is the first water from the tap in the morning.

At the other end are the condo towers along the beach and downtown. A whole-house system in a condo needs access to a line that serves only your unit and the association's approval, which many buildings can't offer. Reverse osmosis under the kitchen sink needs neither, so it's what most condo owners choose. Canal-front houses with docks, pools and outdoor showers are the opposite case: plenty of room for equipment, and the most surfaces where any hardness left in the water would show.

We begin with a free water test at your kitchen sink: hardness, chloramine, total dissolved solids, pH and iron, read on the spot and compared with the City's published results. PFAS can only be measured by a certified lab, so for that we go by EPA's plant data unless you'd like a lab sample. Homes built before 1986 also get the lead sample.

Most standard installs are finished the same day. Softeners use Fleck or Clack valves with a 5-year valve warranty and 10-year tank warranty, and 10% crosslink resin that holds up better in chloramine water. After that, the same local team handles filter and cartridge replacement, carbon rebeds and softener salt delivery across the city's ZIP codes. You call us directly, not a national call center.