Water filter installation in North Jersey

What the water is like across North Jersey

The defining feature here is that very few North Jersey towns treat their own water. Bloomfield buys from Newark. Wayne and Bayonne buy from the North Jersey District Water Supply Commission, whose reservoirs are Wanaque and Monksville. Irvington sits on a system that is more than half purchased from ten separate neighbours. Union City and West New York take Veolia's Hackensack supply, treated at Haworth with ozone and dissolved air flotation rather than the conventional process. East Orange is the exception that proves the rule: it owns a 2,300 acre reserve in Millburn, Livingston and Florham Park and draws eighteen of its own wells. What follows for a household is that the annual report describing your water is often published by a utility in a different county from the one you live in.

What this means locally

Housing age decides most jobs here. Newark, Jersey City, Paterson, Passaic and East Orange all carry large stocks of pre-1940 multi-family buildings, and in a building like that the service line is shared, the riser is old, and a tenant controls none of it. That pushes the practical answer toward a filter at the kitchen tap certified to NSF/ANSI 53 for lead rather than anything on the main line. Newark's lead service line replacement programme is the one most people in the region have heard of, having replaced roughly 23,000 lines in under three years, and it reset expectations for what a municipal programme can achieve. The counterweight is Morris County, where Parsippany-Troy Hills draws nineteen of its own wells from glacial sand and gravel, hardness is the complaint rather than lead, and a softener is often the correct purchase. Two households forty minutes apart on the same commuter line need opposite equipment, and the only way to know which you are is to find your utility and read its report.

Utilities we have researched here

11 separate utilities supply the researched towns in this region, and they do not all treat water the same way.

• Bloomfield Water Department
• East Orange Water Commission
• Jersey City Municipal Utilities Authority, operated under contract by Veolia
• New Jersey American Water, Elizabeth system
• New Jersey American Water, Short Hills system
• Newark Department of Water and Sewer Utilities
• Passaic Valley Water Commission (PVWC)
• Township of Parsippany-Troy Hills Water Department
• Township of Wayne Division of Water
• Veolia Water New Jersey, Hackensack system
• Veolia, Bayonne operations

What that means for equipment

• 2 towns use chloramine rather than free chlorine as the residual disinfectant. Chloramine needs catalytic carbon or a much longer contact time than a standard cartridge gives it, and a softener on it should be specified with chloramine resistant resin.
• 5 draw at least part of the supply from groundwater. Groundwater is steadier through the year than surface water and usually harder, and it tends to bring iron and manganese rather than the seasonal taste changes a reservoir produces.
• 11 have a documented lead service line position. In every one of them the lead comes from the service line or the plumbing inside the building rather than from the supply, so the measurement that answers it is a first draw sample taken after water has stood overnight.
• 3 have a published PFAS position. Where treatment is warranted it is granular activated carbon or reverse osmosis certified to NSF/ANSI 58. Where the utility already treats for it at the plant, a household system adds nothing.

Towns we cover in North Jersey

Each has its own page carrying the utility, the source water, the treatment and the lead position, with every figure attributed to a publisher and the year it refers to.

We serve 18 areas in North Jersey in total. The 7 not linked above are covered through the nearest listed town, usually because they share its water system and a separate page would repeat the same facts under a different name.

The researched towns side by side

Every figure below is taken from the town page it links to, where it carries its publisher and the year it refers to. A blank means we hold no sourced figure for that town rather than that the value is zero.

Systems we install here

Installation and service across North Jersey

Other regions in New Jersey

Or read the New Jersey hub for the state regulators, the PFAS and lead rules that apply across New Jersey, and every area we cover there.