Water hardness in Cliffside Park, New Jersey

The published hardness reading for Cliffside Park is 136 mg/L, equal to 8 grains per gallon — hard water. That number comes from Veolia Hackensack Service System and appears in Veolia Water New Jersey Hackensack 2024 Annual Water Quality Report (PWSID NJ0238001) (2025 (2024 data)).

Expect visible scale on fixtures, spotting on dishes, and shortened service life on water heaters that are never flushed. Ion-exchange softening is generally worth considering at this level.

The supply here is Veolia Hackensack System, a regional system reporting 8 gpg of hardness for every town it serves, Cliffside Park included. That is why 50 other New Jersey municipalities publish the same number.

See the full Veolia Hackensack System water quality report for the complete panel — sodium, chloride, sulfate, fluoride, manganese, iron, pH and total dissolved solids — plus every other town on the system.

With hardness reported at 8 gpg, Cliffside Park counts as hard. An ion-exchange softener is generally the better fit than a conditioner at this level, because it removes the calcium and magnesium rather than converting them, which is what prevents scale in the water heater as well as on fixtures. A conditioner still helps if brine discharge is restricted or there is no drain nearby.

The appliances decide most of this. At 8 gpg the water heater, dishwasher and any coffee or ice machine take the load first; if none of those are new, descaling and an annual heater flush buy time while you decide.

If you do buy, size the unit against 8 gpg and your own household occupancy rather than a county average — capacity and regeneration frequency both come off that pair of numbers.

Run the arithmetic before committing: softening at this level carries salt, water and servicing costs every year, against slower element scaling and less detergent. Below the hard band that trade rarely pays back on utility alone; above it, the heater replacement usually decides it.

For the mechanics behind that, what hard water actually is covers the units and scale chemistry, and the Learn hub compares softeners against conditioners in detail.

Veolia Hackensack System reports sodium of 86 ppm (above NJ recommended upper limit of 50 ppm) — the top of that range, about 86 ppm, is already above the 20 mg/L level the EPA suggests as a guide for people on a physician-ordered 500 mg/day sodium restriction, before any treatment is added at the house.

That matters if softening is on the table in Cliffside Park, because ion exchange trades calcium and magnesium for sodium at roughly 8 mg/L for every grain per gallon removed — on 8 gpg that is an added ~64 mg/L on top of what the utility already delivers. Households watching sodium usually leave the kitchen cold tap unsoftened or fit potassium chloride instead.

For the full breakdown, read how much sodium a softener actually adds, which sets out the sources behind it.