Water softeners in Monaghan, Co. Monaghan. Supplied and fitted.

Why Monaghan town water is hard

Much of rural Monaghan drinks lake water from group schemes, but the town doesn't. Its public supply is pumped from four boreholes about 6 km from the Crosses water treatment plant, where iron and manganese are taken out before the water is chlorinated, and it's topped up from the Togan plant at Gortakeegan reservoir. Groundwater spends a long time in the rock and picks up calcium and magnesium on the way, so what reaches your taps is hard. Our estimate for the town supply is around 250 mg/L of calcium carbonate.

The same plant also feeds Scotstown and Ballinode, and hard water out that way has been raised at county council meetings more than once.

What hard water does in a Monaghan house

• Kettles and immersions. White crust in the kettle within weeks, and scale building on the immersion element until it burns out.
• Electric showers. The heater can furs up, the spray plate blocks and the shower starts tripping out on a hot setting.
• Combi and system boilers. Scale in the plate heat exchanger means hot water that runs lukewarm and a boiler working harder than it should.
• Taps, glass and tiles. Spotted shower screens and dull taps no matter how often you clean them.

A whole-house softener on the rising main stops it before it starts and protects everything downstream of it.

Which AquaSilk suits a Monaghan home

On water around 250 mg/L the size comes down to how many live in the house. A couple or a small family in the town suits the AquaSilk Mini, which fits under most kitchen sinks. A family of four or five with two bathrooms, the usual house out the Clones, Armagh and Dublin roads, suits the Midi. Big houses with three or more bathrooms take the Maxi. The size picker below marks the right one for your household.

Private wells and group schemes around Monaghan

Out towards Emyvale, Glaslough, Tydavnet and Smithborough a lot of houses are on their own well or a group scheme. North Monaghan groundwater often carries iron and manganese as well as hardness, which is exactly why the town's own plant has to strip them out. A softener on its own won't fix brown staining or a metallic taste, so for a well we send a sample to an accredited lab and specify the system off the results. See our well water treatment page.

Getting it fitted in Monaghan

Monaghan is under two hours up the M1 and N2 from our Dublin base, and we cover Carrickmacross, Castleblayney, Clones and Emyvale on the same run. Order the softener fitted online or ring us, send a photo of your stop valve and the space beside it, and we book a slot. Two to three hours and you have soft water. The fitted price shown is the full price for Monaghan. For a quote first, use the quote form, and for the rest of the county see our Co. Monaghan page.