Windsor Heights has no water utility of its own. Here is who actually supplies your tap, what the 2025 testing found, and what an under-sink system changes.
Not a small one. Not a shared one. None at all. That single fact explains every number on this page.
Most metro suburbs at least have a utility that buys water and runs its own pipes. Windsor Heights does not. The Iowa DNR's source water program has no public water supply ID registered to Windsor Heights, because there is no Windsor Heights water system to register. The city's own code settles it. Section 90.03 reads: "Water service to all customers within and without Windsor Heights that are connected to the water system shall be provided by the Des Moines Water Works, pursuant to the terms of a Chapter 28E Agreement between the City and the Des Moines Water Works." The city's website describes that service today as arriving through Central Iowa Water Works, the regional production authority established in 2024, with Des Moines Water Works operating the treatment plants.
Open the 2026 Drinking Water Quality Report and you will not find a Windsor Heights row. Every other suburb in the region gets one. Windsor Heights appears instead in the footnote attached to the Des Moines row: "Includes water supplied to Alleman, Berwick, Cumming, Pleasant Hill, Unincorporated Polk County and Windsor Heights." So the Des Moines distribution numbers are the Windsor Heights numbers. There is no separate sampling program for your city, because there is no separate system to sample.
Treats up to 75 million gallons a day drawn from the Raccoon River, the Des Moines River, or the Water Works Park infiltration gallery. It serves the general Des Moines Water Works customer base, which is where Windsor Heights sits.
Windsor Heights has no wells, no reservoir, no plant and no additional treatment stage of its own. Water is produced, treated and chlorinated in Des Moines, then travels through the Des Moines distribution system to your street. Your city is the far end of somebody else's pipe.
That means Windsor Heights drinks river water, same as Des Moines proper. The Iowa DNR rates the Raccoon River, the Des Moines River and the alluvial aquifer feeding these plants as "High" susceptibility to surface contamination. Those two rivers supply roughly 600,000 central Iowans.
Every number below comes from the 2026 Drinking Water Quality Report covering 2025 data, published by Central Iowa Water Works and Des Moines Water Works. Windsor Heights is inside the Des Moines distribution row.
µg/L highest single lead sample in the distribution system that serves Windsor Heights, above the 15 action level. The 90th percentile was non-detect.
2026 Water Quality Report ↗mg/L peak nitrate in treated water at the Fleur Drive plant in 2025, against a federal limit of 10. That is the plant behind the Windsor Heights tap.
2026 Water Quality Report ↗public water supply IDs registered to Windsor Heights with the Iowa DNR. No system, no local sampling, no city-specific water report.
Iowa DNR Source Water ↗| Des Moines distribution system, which includes Windsor Heights | Result | Range | Limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total trihalomethanes (TTHM) | 56 µg/L | 41 to 77 | 80 µg/L |
| Haloacetic acids (HAA5) | 11 µg/L | 9 to 17 | 60 µg/L |
| Chlorine (running annual average) | 1.20 mg/L | 0.27 to 2.18 | 4 mg/L |
| Lead, 90th percentile (2024) | Non-detect | ND to 21 µg/L | 15 µg/L action level |
| Total coliform (151 samples) | 2 positive | Repeat samples clear | Presence / absence |
The water Windsor Heights drank in 2025 met every federal standard. We are not going to pretend otherwise, and we are not going to invent a Windsor Heights water problem that the data does not show. Compared with the rest of the region, these are middle-of-the-pack results. Trihalomethanes averaged 56 against a limit of 80, which is lower than Urbandale, Clive, Waukee and Norwalk came in at. Haloacetic acids at 11 are nowhere near the 60 limit.
Two lines in that table are still worth your attention, and both of them are about what happens after the water leaves the plant.
First, lead. The 90th-percentile result was non-detect, so the system serving Windsor Heights does not have a widespread lead problem. But one sampled home came back at 21 µg/L, over the 15 action level. Lead does not ride in from Fleur Drive. It leaches out of service lines, solder joints and fixtures inside one specific house. A city-wide average tells you very little about your own kitchen.
Second, the chlorine range. The disinfectant residual across this system swung from 0.27 to 2.18 mg/L over the year, the widest spread of any distribution system in the report. That spread is what long pipe runs and low-flow ends of a network look like. Windsor Heights sits at the end of the Des Moines system rather than at the front of its own.
For the record, this water is disinfected with free chlorine, not chloramine. Chloramine turns up in some fringe systems around the metro such as Bondurant, Warren and Xenia. Worth knowing, because the two behave differently in a filter.
Windsor Heights has no way to opt out of this. When the rivers spike, the city has no second source to switch to.
The first Stage III ban in the region's history. All residential and commercial lawn watering stopped. Nitrate in the Raccoon River hit 14.39 mg/L and the Des Moines River 14.04 mg/L on the day it was issued. Restrictions ran into late July.
CIWW Stage III updates ↗It happened again. Central Iowa Water Works issued a second mandatory ban on June 8, stating the system was "operating at the limits of its available treatment resources." The Water Works Park infiltration gallery hit 12.3 mg/L and stayed above 10 for roughly 90 days, a record.
Iowa Public Radio, Jun 2026 ↗Those restrictions were not about running out of water. They were about protecting the utility's ability to strip nitrate out fast enough to stay under the legal limit. Cutting lawn watering lowers total demand so the nitrate removal system can keep pace. Treated water at Fleur Drive still peaked at 9.17 mg/L in 2025 against a 10 mg/L standard. Iowa has the second-highest cancer incidence rate in the country and the fastest growing, and researchers have linked long-term nitrate exposure in drinking water to several of those cancers. The tap water met the standard both summers. The margin is what changed. Investigate Midwest, Mar 2026 ↗
A land-locked suburb with essentially no vacant ground left and a 78.7% homeownership rate.
Windsor Heights is a fully built-out inner-ring suburb, hemmed in on every side by Des Moines, West Des Moines and Clive. The 2020 Census counted 2,320 housing units, 2,226 of them occupied, at a 4.1% vacancy rate. Nobody is building a new subdivision here. What exists is what you buy, and much of it traces back to the 1958 annexation of the Crestwood area that roughly doubled the city's population.
Population hit 5,252 in the 2020 Census, up 8.1% from 4,860 in 2010. That was the city's strongest decade of growth since the postwar boom, and it followed a run in which Windsor Heights lost population every single decade from 1970 through 2000. More recent Census ACS estimates put the city around 5,143 people.
Census ACS estimates put homeownership in Windsor Heights at 78.7%, well above the roughly 65% national rate, with median household income around $91,707. That matters practically: an under-sink RO system is a permanent improvement to the house, and it makes sense when you are the one staying in it.
Here is where we will be straight with you rather than impressive. We could not find a Census-published median year built for Windsor Heights housing, so we are not going to quote one. What is documented is that this is a small, old, land-locked suburb whose growth happened mid-century, and that the distribution system feeding it recorded one home at 21 µg/L of lead while the system-wide 90th percentile came back non-detect.
That is the whole argument for testing at your sink instead of reading a city average. The water arriving at the Windsor Heights property line is identical to what Pleasant Hill and unincorporated Polk County get. What happens between the curb stop and your glass is specific to your house.
Reverse osmosis is the one household filter that meaningfully reduces nitrate. Pitchers and fridge filters do not.
We install the iSpring RCC7AK 7-stage system under your kitchen sink with its own dedicated faucet. Installation takes one to two hours. Pricing is $699, $849 or $1,099 fully installed depending on configuration, with no separate plumber charge. Older Windsor Heights kitchens often need a stone or tile faucet hole drilled, and we do that in house.
Prime Flow Filtration does point-of-use drinking water only. We do not sell whole-house systems or softeners, and we will tell you plainly if your situation does not call for anything.
Free in-home water test, no obligation. We test your actual kitchen tap, show you the numbers, and tell you honestly whether a system is worth it.