Marquis Water Is Very Hard — Here's What It Costs You Each Year

Why Is Marquis Water So Hard?

Marquis gets its water from Buffalo Pound Lake, delivered through the SaskWater Buffalo Pound Potable Water Supply System. That’s surface water, plain and simple. No deep wells, no ancient aquifer. The hardness story here starts with what that lake water touches before it ever reaches your tap.

Buffalo Pound Lake sits in a broad glacial valley carved out during the last ice age. The terrain around it is classic prairie glacial till, a messy mix of clay, sand, gravel, and rocks dumped by retreating glaciers roughly 10,000 years ago. That till is loaded with carbonate minerals, especially limestone and dolomite fragments ground up by the ice. Rain and snowmelt percolate through this material, and here’s the key: as water moves through soil and rock, it picks up carbon dioxide and becomes slightly acidic. That weak carbonic acid dissolves calcium carbonate and magnesium carbonate from the limestone and dolomite. The dissolved calcium and magnesium ions are what make water hard, and they stay dissolved right into the lake.

But there’s a second layer to this. Buffalo Pound Lake is shallow, wide, and slow-moving. It sits in a semi-arid region where evaporation concentrates whatever is already in the water. The lake also receives runoff from surrounding agricultural land and the Qu’Appelle River system, which drains a huge watershed full of the same glacial till and carbonate-rich soils. So you’re getting hardness from two directions at once: dissolved minerals washing in from the drainage basin, and evaporation steadily concentrating them. That’s why Marquis water measures 12.63 GPG, or 216 ppm, which puts it firmly in the “very hard” category. For reference, the USGS classifies anything above 10.5 GPG as very hard, and the national average in the US is about 7.3 GPG. You’re sitting well above that.

One thing worth being clear about: hardness isn’t a health hazard. The EPA doesn’t regulate it as such, only as a secondary aesthetic contaminant. But at this level, you’ll notice it. Scale builds faster on faucets and showerheads, soap doesn’t lather the way it should, and water heaters work harder. The WQA and Battelle studies found that soft water can cut laundry detergent use by up to 50% and dish soap by up to 70%. And Battelle’s 2009 research for the Water Quality Research Foundation showed roughly a 4% efficiency loss in gas water heaters for every 5 GPG of hardness, assuming a 50-gallon-per-day household. At 12.63 GPG, that adds up. The DOE also notes that just a quarter-inch of scale can drop water heater efficiency by up to 40%. Hard water also shortens water heater service life by an estimated 30 to 50%. That’s the real cost of what’s coming out of your tap.

How Marquis Compares to Nearby Cities

Marquis isn’t alone in dealing with hard water, and that’s because the whole region drinks from the same geological tap. The Buffalo Pound Water Treatment Corp. serves a network of communities across south-central Saskatchewan, all drawing from Buffalo Pound Lake and the Qu’Appelle system. If your neighbors are on that same SaskWater system, they’re getting water with a very similar mineral profile, because it’s literally the same source.

The differences you might see between Marquis and nearby towns come down to treatment, not source. The Buffalo Pound facility treats the water before it’s distributed, and depending on where you are in the distribution network, you might get slightly different hardness readings. But those differences are small. The geology underneath all these communities is the same glacial till and carbonate-rich soils, so the raw water entering the treatment plant has the same fundamental character.

What separates Marquis from some other prairie communities is that it’s on a surface water supply at all. Many small towns in Saskatchewan rely on groundwater wells, and those can vary wildly in hardness depending on which aquifer they tap. Some wells hit softer sandstone formations; others punch into deep limestone and come up with water that’s even harder than what you’re seeing. So while Marquis water is definitely on the hard side, it’s not an outlier for the region. It’s typical of what happens when you take surface water from a shallow prairie lake fed by carbonate-rich runoff. If you’ve lived in other communities on the Buffalo Pound system, you already know what to expect. If you’re new to the area, this is just what prairie surface water looks like.

How does Marquis stack up against the rest of Saskatchewan? It's very hard at 12.63 GPG — White City, Edenwold, and Emerald Park sit nearby with different numbers. See the full hardest-water ranking for context.

See where Marquis sits on the Saskatchewan water hardness map →

Want the broader explainer on what hardness actually is and how it behaves? Read hard water vs. soft water, explained.