Water Quality
Chlorine or chloramine: what’s behind that tap-water taste?
Chlorine smell in the shower? Learn how chlorine and chloramine differ and how whole-home carbon treats water before it reaches your bathrooms and taps.
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Ideas and answers for the water your family uses every day.
Water Quality
Read your water report without getting lost in the numbers
Make sense of your water report: find your supplier, read the test results, and connect the numbers to taste, mineral buildup, and treatment options.
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Water Quality
PFAS in California water: what to check in your report in 2026
Reading your water report in 2026? Find the PFAS results, understand the units, and learn what to check in a filter’s documented reduction claims.
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Homeowner Guide
Spots, soap scum, and scale: hard water in Sacramento homes
See how hard water leaves spots, soap scum, and scale in Sacramento homes—and how softening removes the minerals behind the cleanup.
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Homeowner Guide
Whole-home filtration and kitchen RO: what each one does
Compare main-line filtration with kitchen reverse osmosis. Learn which treats household water and which supplies the dedicated drinking-water faucet.
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Homeowner Guide
Whole-Home Filtration + Reverse Osmosis vs. a Kangen Machine
Compare a Kangen ionizer with whole-home filtration, softening, and RO: kitchen drinking water, household coverage, and ongoing upkeep.
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LOCAL WATER & HOME
Folsom Lake Water Averaged 53 ppb of Chlorine Byproducts in Granite Bay Last Year. Here's What Trihalomethanes Are, and Why Scientists Are Counting Hundreds More.
Every utility in our area adds chlorine to the water for a good reason: it kills the bacteria and viruses that used to make people sick. But chlorine doesn't stop working once the germs are gone. It keeps reacting with the natural leftovers of leaves, soil and algae in the water, and that...
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LOCAL WATER & HOME
California Says It Has No Lead Water Lines. Here's Where Lead Can Still Hide in an Older Sacramento-Area Home.
This week the EPA staged its first public demonstration of new tools for finding buried lead pipes, and the headline from its Region 2 administrator was simple: "You can't replace what you can't find." Here in California, the search is mostly over, and the result was good news: the State Water...
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LOCAL WATER & HOME
"Forever Chemicals" Now Turn Up in Water Serving 197 Million Americans. Here's What the New Count Means in Sacramento.
The biggest round of tap water testing in U.S. history is wrapping up, and the latest tally landed last week: PFAS, the so-called "forever chemicals," have now been detected in water systems serving an estimated 197 million people. That is 23 million more than earlier testing had identified. For...
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LOCAL WATER & HOME
Sacramento's First Atmospheric River of the El Niño Winter Could Land Next Week. Here's What a Big Storm Does to Your Tap Water.
The rain is finally on the calendar. The Sacramento Bee reported on November 5 that the first atmospheric river of this El Niño season is taking shape for roughly November 11 through 16, and early projections show Sacramento could pick up nearly two inches, its entire November average, in a day...
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LOCAL WATER & HOME
California Just Approved Its Biggest New Reservoir in 50 Years. Here's What River Water Means at a Sacramento-Area Tap.
On Wednesday, the State Water Resources Control Board voted unanimously to grant a water right for Sites Reservoir, a 1.5 million acre-foot lake planned for the dry hills of Colusa County about 65 miles northwest of Sacramento. It is the largest surface-water storage project California has...
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LOCAL WATER & HOME
Bay Area Homeowners Just Got One More Year Before the Gas Water Heater Rule Kicks In. Here's What Hard Water Does to Any Water Heater You Buy.
This week the Bay Area Air Quality Management District gave homeowners in Marin, Sonoma and the rest of the nine-county region one more year before new gas water heaters are phased out, moving the deadline from January 2027 to January 2028. If your water heater is getting old, that puts a big…
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LOCAL WATER & HOME
3M Will Pay $7.35 Billion Over Firefighting Foam. Here's Why Four Air Bases Around Sacramento Are on California's PFAS List.
This week 3M agreed to pay up to $7.35 billion to as many as 120,000 people who say "forever chemicals" in firefighting foam made them sick. It is one of the largest personal-injury settlements in American history, and the story behind it runs straight through the Sacramento region. Mather,...
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LOCAL WATER & HOME
Rio Linda's Water District Just Reported Chromium-6 Above California's Limit. Here's What That Metal Is and How It Gets Treated.
A few miles north of downtown Sacramento, the Rio Linda-Elverta Community Water District published its annual water quality report late last month, and one line stood out: the average level of hexavalent chromium in its wells came in at 10.6 parts per billion, just over California's limit of 10....
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LOCAL WATER & HOME
St. Helena Is Flushing 40 Miles of Pipe to Fix Years of Brown Tap Water. Here's What Actually Turns Water Rusty.
If you have ever turned on the tap and watched rusty, tea-colored water pour out, you know the feeling: you stop, you stare, and you wonder what you have been drinking. For the Napa Valley town of St. Helena, that moment has repeated itself for years. Late last month the city began flushing...
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LOCAL WATER & HOME
Six California Towns Have "Musty" Tap Water This Week. Here's the Compound Behind It — and Why Sacramento Smells It Every Fall
If you have ever poured a glass of water in October and thought it tasted faintly like a damp basement, you were not imagining it. This week, San Luis Obispo County told residents of Pismo Beach, Arroyo Grande, Grover Beach, Oceano, Avila Beach, and Shell Beach that their tap water may smell...
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LOCAL WATER & HOME
South Lake Tahoe Is Still Cleaning Up a Dry-Cleaning Solvent From the 1970s. Here's How PCE Gets Into Well Water.
A dry cleaner near the "Y" in South Lake Tahoe closed decades ago. The chemical it spilled is still underground, and this week a proposed $4.1 million settlement would pay to treat and monitor local drinking water wells for the next 59 years. It is a very local story, but it explains something...
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LOCAL WATER & HOME
A New Study Says "Not Detected" Doesn't Mean Zero for PFAS. Here's How to Read Your Water Report.
When you look up your water utility's PFAS results, most of the lines say "not detected" or "below reporting limit." It's reassuring. But a study published October 23 in the journal Cell Reports Sustainability argues those lines are hiding a lot more of the so-called "forever chemicals" than...
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LOCAL WATER & HOME
California Is Moving to List America's No. 2 Weed Killer as a Carcinogen. Here's Where Atrazine Shows Up in Tap Water.
Every spring, American farmers spread roughly 70 million pounds of a weed killer called atrazine on corn, sorghum, and sugarcane fields. Last month, California's Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment announced it intends to add atrazine to the state's Proposition 65 list of chemicals…
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LOCAL WATER & HOME
Folsom Is Replacing Two Leaking Chlorine Tanks at Its Water Plant. Here's What That Chemical Does in Your Water Every Day.
Folsom's water treatment plant has been running on two leaking chemical tanks since summer. On Tuesday the City Council voted 5-0 to spend nearly $918,000 to replace them on an emergency basis, the Sacramento Bee reported this week. The city says drinking water was never at risk, and the story…
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LOCAL WATER & HOME
Microplastics Are Falling With the Sierra Snow That Feeds Folsom Lake. Here's What That Means at Your Tap.
Snow falling over the Sierra Nevada eventually helps supply Folsom Lake, the American River, and many Sacramento-area water systems. A new UC Riverside study, published this week, measured something else arriving with that snow: plastic. Not in the ocean or a river downstream, but in freshly fallen flakes at remote mountain sites that a researcher had to ski to reach.
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Local Water Quality
Lodi and Stockton water: why the spots keep coming back
What the 2025 Lodi and Cal Water Stockton reports say about hardness, scale and mixed supplies—and how filtration, softening and kitchen RO help at home.
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Homeowner Guide
Chlorine taste, mineral buildup, bottled water: where to start
Start with the water problem you notice: chlorine taste, mineral buildup, or buying bottled water. Learn which treatment handles each job.
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