Water softeners in Drogheda, Co. Louth. Supplied and fitted.

Why Drogheda water is so hard

Drogheda's public supply is drawn from the River Boyne and treated at Staleen, a few miles upstream of the town. The Boyne spends its whole life running over limestone, so the water arrives already loaded with calcium and magnesium. Uisce Éireann's figure for the Drogheda supply zone is around 310 mg/L of calcium carbonate, which puts the town firmly in the very hard band alongside Navan and Dundalk.

If you have moved to Drogheda from south Dublin or from anywhere on the Vartry supply, the difference is obvious within a week: cloudy glasses, a kettle that needs descaling, and a white crust on every tap.

What hard water does in a Drogheda home

• Immersions and hot cylinders. Scale builds on the element and the coil, the tank takes longer to heat and the element eventually fails. We change a lot of immersions in Drogheda.
• Electric showers. The heater can scales up, flow drops and the unit starts tripping or running cold. Showers in Drogheda rarely see their full design life.
• Combi boilers. The plate heat exchanger clogs, hot water flow drops to a dribble and the boiler works harder every winter.
• Dishwashers, washing machines and kettles all go the same way, and the laundry comes out stiff.

Fitting a softener where the mains enters the house means every tap, shower and appliance downstream gets soft water from that day on.

Which AquaSilk suits a Drogheda house

The bulk of our Drogheda installs are family homes in estates off the Dublin Road, Rathmullen, Ballsgrove and the newer developments on the north side, typically four or five people and two bathrooms. On 310 mg/L water that is AquaSilk Midi territory. Apartments and smaller houses in the town centre are well served by the Mini, which fits under a kitchen sink. Larger houses out towards Termonfeckin, Baltray and Bettystown with three or more bathrooms are a Maxi job. Use the size picker below and it will mark the right one for your household.

Private wells in the Drogheda area

Plenty of houses between Drogheda, Slane, Collon and Dunleer are on their own well. Louth and east Meath well water is usually hard, but it can also carry iron, manganese or bacteria that a softener alone will not deal with. We send a sample to an accredited lab and specify the system off the results. See our well water treatment page for how that works.

Getting it fitted in Drogheda

Drogheda is forty minutes up the M1 from our base, so it is a regular run for our plumbers and we cover Bettystown, Laytown, Termonfeckin, Duleek, Ardee and Dundalk from the same trip. Order it fitted online or ring us, send a photo of the stop valve and the space beside it, and we book a slot. Two to three hours later you have soft water, salt in the tank and a plumber who has shown you how it works. The fitted price shown is the full price for Drogheda. Prefer a quote first? The quote form takes two minutes, and our main water softener page has the full range.