Water filter installation in Upstate New York

What the water is like across Upstate New York

Four things worth knowing before reading any single city page. Several of these systems are unfiltered by permit rather than by omission: Syracuse is one of a handful of large American systems allowed to supply surface water without filtration. Some are unusually simple because the raw water allows it, as at Schenectady, where chlorination, fluoridation and inorganic phosphate are the only treatment applied to Great Flats Aquifer water. Some carry a heavy natural organic load that has to be treated, as at Utica, where the Hinckley Reservoir drains 374 square miles largely inside the Adirondack Park and the water is high in colour. And several are supplied by county authorities rather than municipalities, so the boundary between one finished water and another moves with operational need rather than following a town line. Clay is the sharpest example, sitting in a system fed by three lakes treated by three separate organisations.

What this means locally

Lead divides upstate sharply. Buffalo has somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 lead service lines still in the ground. Syracuse is worse proportionally: the state health department puts roughly 42 per cent of the city's service lines as lead, with about 14,000 known lines remaining, and the city has committed to replacing all of them within five years, half the time the federal rule allows. Both publish address level inventory maps. Against that, the suburban and county authority territory around those cities is a different world. Amherst was built out largely after lead pipe stopped being installed, so the probability on any given street is low and confirming the record usually closes the question at no cost. The rule of thumb that actually works here is the age of the street rather than the age of the region: a pre-war city grid means check carefully and use a certified filter meanwhile, a post-war subdivision means check once and move on. New York's Lead Pipe Right to Know Act required every covered system to publish an inventory by 16 October 2024.

Utilities we have researched here

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

• Albany Water Board
• Buffalo Water
• City of Rochester Bureau of Water
• City of Syracuse Department of Water
• City of Troy Department of Public Utilities
• Endicott Municipal Water Department
• Erie County Water Authority
• Johnson City Water Department
• Mohawk Valley Water Authority
• Monroe County Water Authority
• Onondaga County Water Authority
• Schenectady City Water Works
• Town of Colonie, Latham Water District

What that means for equipment

• 1 town uses 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.
• 4 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 Upstate New York

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 16 areas in Upstate New York in total. The 4 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 Upstate New York

Other regions in New York

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