I’ve been having a problem with very brown water coming from the hot water tap of my tub. No other faucet, hot or cold, is affected. I let it run 30 seconds until the water clears, and then started filling the tub. When I came back in a few minutes, the tub was full of very dark water. It obviously, at some point, went from clear back to brown. After draining it, there was a gritty residue left in the bottom. I don’t use it often – or in the past several months, attempt to use it often. Any ideas what might be going on?
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I ran into a similar problem once and looked and found that apparently the plumber had run out of (in this case) galvanized pipe and did the last short nipple in the spout with black pipe and so it rusted. Maybe somewhere in your supply there is some black pipe? Another thing to look for might be dissimilar metals--like a connection of copper to galvanized without a dielectric union.
Yeah, most likely there's a mixture of iron and copper pipe feeding the tub. What you're seeing is essentially rust caused by electrolytic action between the dissimilar metals. Harmless in the near term, but eventually (in ten days or ten years) the iron pipe will rust through.