City-Water Treatment in Hunters Creek, Florida

Orange County Utilities served over 174,300 accounts and more than 610,000 people in 2025, producing 26 billion gallons through four regional and eight remote facilities, along 2,047 miles of water main, across a 474-square-mile service area. A system that size does not produce one uniform product. It produces several, and it reports on them separately.

The source is the same throughout. The County describes the groundwater it uses as needing little or no treatment other than disinfection and aeration to remove naturally present hydrogen sulfide, and it shows: the metals, nitrate, and sodium rows on its sheets sit far enough under their limits to give a homeowner very little to argue with. What disinfection leaves behind is where the regional systems come apart.

Two separate factors determine how local a published figure really is, and they are worth keeping apart because the answer differs across rows. The first is the public water system number. All three disinfection byproduct figures, including bromate, are reported as locational running annual averages, and the County publishes one set for each regional system. Those figures belong to your service area and to everyone else on PWS 348-4119 with you. Narrower than a county figure. Wider than your street.

The second is the point of entry. In the County's own words, these are sites where potable water is pumped from the water supply facility into the distribution system for delivery to customers, and they are the collection sites from which samples are taken. Orange County Utilities publishes its list, and one of the five collection sites under the South Service Area is named Hunters Creek. Results are reported site by site, as is federal PFAS testing; therefore, they include a figure attached to a sampling point named after this community. That is as local as utility data gets here, and we come back to what it shows further down.

Orange County describes Hunter's Creek, in its own spelling, as a 6.5-square-mile community in the southwest corner of the county. Its water comes off the Southern Regional Water System, public water system number 348-4119. The East Service Area, PWS 348-4132, is the same utility, the same aquifer, the same county commission, and the same billing office. Here is what the County published for each of them for calendar year 2025.

Neither system incurred a maximum contaminant level violation in 2025, and it is worth being precise about the scope of that, because the County is. Two things sit underneath it on the East sheet. The County reports three East samples in 2025 with trihalomethane results above 80 parts per billion, which is possible without a violation because the limit applies to the running annual average at a site, not to any one sample. Separately, the County reports that one East sample from May 2025 was invalidated on quality control grounds, a monitoring failure rather than a contaminant one, and that after a make-up sample the system returned to compliance and has remained there. On the contaminant limits themselves, neither system's running annual averages went over.

What the table does show is that two halves of one utility produced measurably different water in the same year. The South sheet shows a bromate reading of 7.25 parts per billion, against a limit of 10. The East sheet carries no bromate row at all. The trihalomethane numbers run the other way, with the East Service Area sitting closer to its ceiling than the South.

So when somebody quotes you a figure for Orange County water, the first question is which service area they took it from. If they cannot say which, the figure is not about your house, and a county-wide average would flatten the very difference the County went to the trouble of publishing.

Here is the part that decides what we would actually sell you, and it is why a Hunters Creek quote from us reads differently from one written on the other side of Orlando. Your sheet has three byproduct rows. Whole-house carbon is the established household answer to two of them, the trihalomethanes and the haloacetic acids. The third it does not touch: bromate is an inorganic ion, carbon has little affinity for it, and the recognized household routes are reverse osmosis or anion exchange, neither of which we install. So the one figure that most separates your service area from the East is the one figure our equipment leaves alone, and every quote we write here says on its face which rows it covers. We would sooner lose the job than let that sit unsaid.

One more result deserves to be said out loud, because it is the most local figure on this page and it runs counter to our interests. Orange County tested all five South Service Area points of entry, the one named Hunters Creek among them, for the full federal PFAS panel in August 2023 and again in February 2024. Every compound came back as ND at all five sites on both rounds, which the County defines as no detections above the minimum reporting level for the federal monitoring program. If somebody has told you a Hunters Creek address needs filtration because of PFAS, the County's published testing at the sampling point named after this community does not support it, and we will not sell it to you on that basis.

We would rather you did this first. It costs nothing, it does not involve us, and it means whoever you call next has to talk to you about your actual water.

Find your water bill and confirm the biller is Orange County Utilities. A Hunters Creek address is not automatically on the County system, and if a different utility bills you, then none of the figures on this page apply to you.

Open the County's annual drinking water report at ocfl.net. It is organized by service area and not by city, and the County's own instruction is to use its Service Areas map to find which one covers you before reading any data. Be warned that the report does not mention this community by name anywhere in its 23 pages. For a Hunters Creek address, the heading you want is the Southern Regional Water System, PWS 3484119, which the County's PFAS page also labels South Service Area PWS 348-4119.

Read your own three disinfection byproduct rows: bromate, total trihalomethanes and haloacetic acids. Note the detected level, the range across sampling sites, and the limit. The level detected for these rows is a locational running annual average, not a single measurement, so the range matters as much as the headline figure: it tells you how much the water varies between sampling points within your own service area.

Turn to the County's PFAS test results page, which is a separate page from the annual report and is the only County document that names this community. Find the collection site called Hunters Creek under the South Service Area. The results are published in full for two rounds of testing.

If anything is unclear, the County's Water Division answers on 407-254-9850 and at 9150 Curry Ford Road. Ask them what your service area's figures mean before you ask a contractor. A contractor who is annoyed that you did is telling you something useful.