The 12 alluvial wells that supply the South Adams County Water and Sanitation District’s 66,000 customers produce severely hard water, requiring local homeowners to frequently replace plumbing and water heaters and purchase costly in-home softeners that release corrosive brine waste into the sewer. The softeners also contribute to discharges of high dissolved solids from the district’s wastewater treatment plant.
Mineral pellet softening technology, a proven treatment process in Europe, offered a compact, cost-effective way to rectify the hardness issues and meet the district’s finished water goals. That led to construction of an 18-million-gallon-per-day water softening and filtration plant—the largest facility of its type in the U.S. and the first in the world to utilize load cells to remotely manage pellet size and inventory. The load cells allow the facility to be unattended for half of the day, resulting in lower personnel costs that help reduce customers’ softening rates. In addition, spent pellets can be beneficially reused in a variety of local applications.