Water softeners in Portlaoise, Co. Laois. Supplied and fitted.

Why Portlaoise water is so hard

Portlaoise is different from the Boyne towns in one respect: most of its public supply is pumped from the ground rather than taken from a river. That makes the hardness worse, not better. Groundwater in Laois has spent years working through limestone, dissolving calcium and magnesium the whole way, so it comes out of the borehole already hard. Uisce Éireann's figure for the Portlaoise supply zone is around 300 mg/L of calcium carbonate, right on the line between hard and very hard.

You see it on the shower screen, on the taps, in the bottom of the kettle, and on the bill when the immersion goes.

What hard water does in a Portlaoise home

• Hot cylinders and immersions. Scale on the element means a longer heat-up, higher bills and an early failure. We change plenty of immersions around the town.
• Electric showers and mixer valves. Scale blocks the heater can and the spray plate; the pressure drops and the shower cuts in and out.
• Combi boilers. The plate heat exchanger furs up and the hot water flow drops away over a couple of winters.
• Washing machines, dishwashers and kettles all scale up and get replaced years before they should.

A whole-house softener on the incoming mains stops every bit of that. Everything downstream gets soft water.

Which AquaSilk suits a Portlaoise house

Most of the homes we fit in Portlaoise are three and four bed houses in the estates off the Mountmellick, Stradbally and Abbeyleix roads, with four or five people and two bathrooms. On 300 mg/L water the AquaSilk Midi is the usual pick. Smaller households and apartments in the town are well covered by the Mini, which fits under a kitchen sink. Bigger houses with three or more bathrooms, common out towards Emo and Ballyroan, want the Maxi. The size picker below will mark the right one.

Private wells around Portlaoise

Once you leave the town, a huge share of Laois homes are on their own borehole. The same limestone that hardens the public supply hardens well water too, and private wells can also carry iron, manganese or bacteria that a softener on its own will not fix. We send a sample to an accredited lab and specify the right system from the results, which may be a softener alone or a softener with a filter ahead of it. Our well water treatment page covers it.

Getting it fitted in Portlaoise

Portlaoise is an hour down the M7 from our Dublin base and we cover Mountmellick, Abbeyleix, Stradbally, Mountrath and Portarlington 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. The install takes two to three hours and you have soft water before the van leaves. The fitted price on this page is the full price for Portlaoise, no mileage added. If you want a quote first, use the quote form, or see the full range on our main water softener page.