Irish Water Profiles

This item presents a set of tables giving you information on water profiles for named water supply areas in Ireland. The raw data has been sourced from Local Authorities and the EPA and is summarised here to, hopefully, save you time. If you find we are missing your area and you happen to have a water profile report, please let us know and we can add it to the database, but bear in mind this is a work in progress. According to the EPA there are 928 Public Water Supply (PWS) areas in Ireland covering almost 80% of the population. We are going to try and get all of these, but it may take some time!

The values we generally look for are:

• Calcium (Ca)
• Magnesium (Mg)
• Sodium (Na)
• Sulfate (SO₄)
• Chloride (Cl)
• Bicarbonates (HCO₃)

Most of these can be read directly from the reports, but many reports tend to leave out Sodium and don't have an actual value for the Bicarbonate level. However, some brewing software (BeerTools Pro and ProMash for example) have tools that will calculate the Bicarbonate (HCO₄) level given the Total Alkalinity (TA as mg CaCO₃/L) and pH, both of which do feature on the reports. These were used to calculate the Bicarbonate levels you see in the table below.

You should note that while some reports give precise values for certain elements, many give broad ranges. Presumably this is because a report is based on tests carried out over a full year. In cases where large ranges have been given (generally relating to Total Alkalinity and Hardness) I've chosen the mean value, so everything you see here should be average.

The results of all this are what you see here. Where the range is large I've given notes at the bottom of the table to show the maximum values.

Notes:
To determine exactly which water supply serves you, you may need to call your Local Authority
All values are in mg/litre where appropriate, which is equivalent to ppm.
Total Alkalinity (TA) and Total Hardness (TH) is quoted as mg CaCO3/litre

1. Source: HSE, provided by Peter Dudley. "The report records the results for a drinking water sample taken in the Monread Heights estate in Naas in July 2012. That's the area to the North of the town close to the large Tesco store by the Dublin Road. I was told this sample was representative of the water in the surrounding regions since they are all served by the Ballymore Eustace treatment centre, which takes it's water from the Poulaphouca Reservoir (i.e. the Blessington Lakes). The further you get from this source the less reliable the figures (the granite landscape in Wicklow soon turns to limestone as you move closer to Dublin)."

2. Leixlip has a broad range for TA, 70-200 and a TH of 100-300. Taking the max values yields a bicarbonate level of 242 mg HCO₃.