Tank Water Heaters in Gray, Maine

Gray Homes and What They Need

Gray's roughly 4,600 homes are younger than much of Cumberland County. Census estimates put the median year built at 1983, and only about one in eight predates 1940. Those older houses cluster around Gray Village and along the old roads out toward Dry Mills. The bigger story is the building wave of the 1970s through the 2000s, when capes, ranches and colonials went up on wooded lots within reach of Turnpike exit 63; about a quarter of homes date from 2000 or later. Roughly one in twenty is a manufactured home, and around 670 units are held for seasonal use, many of them camps on Little Sebago, Crystal and Forest lakes. Houses from the 1980s and 1990s are now reaching the age where original boilers, furnaces and electrical panels with no spare breaker space come due, while a lakeside camp raises questions about insulation and year-round use.

Water Supply and Drains in Gray

Water in Gray is a patchwork. The Gray Water District runs mains through the village and along roads such as Shaker Road and Lewiston Road, but the town has no public or district sewer, even where a water line passes the door, so every home relies on a septic system. Outside the district, households drink from private wells, and bedrock wells here deserve testing: in a USGS review of 2005-09 lab results, about 27 percent of Gray wells sampled exceeded the federal arsenic standard, among the higher rates in Cumberland County. East Gray also carries the history of the McKin Superfund site, where solvents from a 1960s-70s waste facility reached private wells and nearby residents were offered public water. The practical upshot is treatment equipment matched to the well, pressure tanks kept in working order, and tank water heaters chosen with the water chemistry in mind.

Getting to Know Gray