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Serving Mobile + Baldwin County, AL
Free in-home water test · results while we're there
Serving Mobile + Baldwin County, AL
Free in-home water test · results while we're there
Mobile + Baldwin County, Alabama
About 800,000 Alabamians — one in five — drink from a private supply, and nobody tests it for them. If you are one of them on the coast, the sand you are pumping from has a name, a published thickness, and a measured chemistry. Here is what the USGS and the state actually say about it.
Hardness, pH, chlorine and TDS, measured at your kitchen tap and explained on the spot. No charge and no obligation.
Rather talk it through?
The Citronelle Formation is the Pliocene sand-and-gravel unit that caps most of the coastal plain here, and its type locality — the outcrop geologists measured it against — is Citronelle, in northern Mobile County, along the old Mobile & Ohio Railroad. It was named there in 1916 and the name stuck across five states.
It is thin in the north of the county and thickens seaward, reaching roughly 200 feet in the subsurface beneath Dauphin Island. Its largest northern outlier sits near Turnerville; around Semmes and Bates Field it outcrops as relatively thick sandy clay.
The part that matters to a well owner is one sentence from the USGS description: much of the formation is highly permeable, and it forms the Sand and Gravel Aquifer. Permeability is why the water is easy to reach and plentiful. It is also why what happens at the surface reaches it — which is the entire argument for testing a shallow well more often than a deep one.
Sources: Matson & Berry, USGS Professional Paper 98-L (1916); USGS Geolex unit 1073; Geological Survey of Alabama SM093, Geology of Mobile County (1971); USGS State Geologic Map Compilation unit description.
Public systems are regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act and file results with the EPA — which is why we can publish a compliance record for every utility in these two counties. Private wells are outside that. The Alabama Department of Public Health puts it plainly: if you get your drinking water from your own well, you alone are responsible for assuring that it is safe.
County health departments supply sample containers and handle bacteriological testing. That is the right first call for a bacteria question. What it does not tell you is the everyday chemistry — hardness, pH, dissolved solids — which is what decides whether equipment is worth installing and what kind.
Source: Alabama Department of Public Health, Well Water program.
USGS sampling across these two counties finds a majority of groundwater sites above the secondary standard for iron. Iron is a nuisance contaminant: staining, metallic taste, and it fouls other equipment. We do not install dedicated iron treatment, and that has a practical consequence worth stating up front rather than at the end of a sales visit.
UV disinfection is the usual answer to bacteria in a private well, and the NSF/ANSI 55 standard it is built to assumes iron and manganese are already low upstream. On a well where iron is high, UV alone is not the right recommendation, and pretending otherwise produces an install that disappoints. If a test shows that is your situation, we will say so and point you to someone who handles it.
We also do not drill wells or service the drilling side. What we do is read the water and treat what is treatable — whole-house well filtration, pH correction for the low-pH water this aquifer is known for, and pump, tank and pressure-switch work.
Aquifer-wide medians describe the formation. Your well is one point in it, and the only way to know which point is to measure it.
We measure hardness, pH, chlorine and TDS at your tap and tell you what the numbers mean — including when the answer is that you do not need anything.