Water Treatment
Services in
Palm Springs, FL

From the surficial aquifer, a shallow layer of sand and limestone that reaches to about 200 feet below the ground in eastern Palm Beach County. The Village pumps it from 17 well sites to two plants of its own, the Main plant and the R.L. Pratt plant, which together make about 4.1 million gallons a day. The water passes through magnetic ion exchange to strip out natural organic matter and color, then lime softening, chloramine disinfection and filtration. The Village was one of the first utilities in the country to use that ion exchange step, a process developed in Australia.

The Main plant dates from 1957, when the Village's developers built it with three wells and lime softening. The Village bought it in 1966, enlarged it in the 1970s and opened the current treatment process in February 1999. Work under way now includes a new lime feed system at the Pratt plant, a rebuilt Well No. 19 and a replaced Well No. 14 with a backup generator. The Village's 2025 water quality report lists every result and reports no violations.

The utility serves more people than live in the Village. Its customers include the small Town of Lake Clarke Shores, which buys Village water for most of its homes, and unincorporated streets in the 33406 and 33415 ZIP codes. If your mailing address says West Palm Beach or Lake Worth but your bill comes from the Village, everything on this page applies to your tap.

The Village covered about 1.65 square miles in 2000 and about 4.25 by 2020, after two decades of annexing the unincorporated neighborhoods around it. Utility lines didn't move with the borders. When the County studied the annexation area in 2005, the Village's water service covered the central third of it; land north of Forest Hill Boulevard and south of Lake Worth Road was in the County's service area, and a small section south of 10th Avenue North and east of Congress Avenue was on Lake Worth's system.

Some of those lines may have shifted since, so the bill is the reliable answer. A County bill means your water matches the supply we describe on our Greenacres page, which measured far less PFOS in the same federal tests. A City of Lake Worth Beach bill means a blend of lime-softened and reverse osmosis water from that city's plants. The free test settles the rest, because it measures what reaches your faucet regardless of who sends the bill.

An under-sink RO system is usually the right answer for renters and condo owners. It connects to the cold line and drain in the kitchen cabinet, needs no change to the building's plumbing and can come with you when you move. Because the PFAS, chlorate and chromium-6 concerns here are about drinking and cooking water, it covers the issues that matter most without touching the rest of the unit.

Whole-house carbon is a different job. It goes on the line that feeds your unit, so you need access to that line and, in most buildings, written approval from the HOA or landlord first. Many townhomes and villas built here in the 1970s and 1980s have their own meter and shutoff, which makes it possible; in a mid-rise building with a shared main it usually isn't. We look at the plumbing during the free test and tell you which applies before you ask the association. Our answers to common installation questions cover the condo approval step in more detail.

Chlorate is worth explaining because the Village's 2014 results ran from about two to more than three and a half times EPA's reference level. EPA's monitoring that year found 720 to 760 ppb in June and 416 to 484 ppb in December, at both plants and in the distribution pipes. Chlorate is generally linked to chlorine-based disinfectants, especially stored bleach solutions. EPA used 210 ppb as a health reference level in that survey, based on chlorate's effect on the thyroid, but it has never set an enforceable limit, so the Village isn't required to test for it now.

Hexavalent chromium, the form made famous by the Erin Brockovich case, measured 0.14 to 0.54 ppb in the same testing. There's no federal limit for it; EPA regulates total chromium at 100 ppb, and California's state limit is 10 ppb. Both results are over a decade old, which is why we describe them as history rather than current levels. If either concerns you, an RO system at the kitchen is designed to reduce both, along with PFAS.

Lime softening is a step the Village has used since 1957, so its water isn't as hard as untreated well water. How hard it ends up depends on the season and the mix of wells running, and with no published figure, your own reading is the only number worth acting on. White crust on shower heads, cloudy glasses and a water heater that rumbles are signs the plant left enough hardness behind to justify a softener.

In a 1970s or 1980s house that's still on its original water heater, a softener protects what's left of it; in an apartment with a shared heater, it rarely makes sense. When one goes in, we put the carbon tank ahead of it so chloramine never reaches the resin, and we keep hose bibs and sprinklers on unsoftened water to save salt.

More than half of the homes here were built before 1980, and about 2,600 date to the 1960s or earlier, including the first 800 houses built around the Village's man-made chain of lakes by 1958. Lead solder was legal in household plumbing until 1986, so any home from that era with original copper lines can add small amounts of lead even when the Village's own sampling is low. The answer comes from a first-draw sample: water that sat in your pipes overnight, drawn before anyone runs the tap. We take that sample during your consultation and a certified lab analyzes it free of charge.