Well, the addition is finished, we’ve moved back to the farm, and ugh, the water tastes a whole lot different than it did when i was a kid. It had had a funny taste lately, but I thought that us moving back in, and moving more water through the system would clean it up. Wrong,,,,,,..
The shower takes on a distinctive yellow glow after about 2 days. Brand new toilet is starting to stain. Never had to clean a toilet so much :^(
Kids won’t drink a drop. Plumber says he has an iron filter, will run me about $700-800 to put on, low maintenance. I trust him, but would like to hear other peoples’ opinions about filters and how well they work. It will need to go early in the system, before the HWH, cause my wash is suffering too.
Doesn’t seem to be any sulphur, though I know some neighbours do have sulphur in their wells. I don’t want to put on a water softener, but need to get rid of the iron somehow.
I’d love to hear any suggestions, experiences. Anything I should stay away from. ??Not considering reverse osmosis, hear it dumps more water than it processes.
Thanks in advance.
Replies
First thing to do is have the water tested by someone who knows what they are looking for. Then a system can be designed to remover what it is that is causing or is likely to cause problems.
often, when Iron is a problem, you also have high manganese which causes worse staining problems, especially in the laundry. Adding Clorine to water that is already high in Manganese can turn white linens yellow. When it sits, exposed to oxygen, lik ein the toilet bowl, a precipitate will stain it yellow too. Looks just like rust but it's not.
If you have old plumbing with galvanize pipe, you may need to replace it to get rid of rust inside it.
Excellence is its own reward!
Hmmm, I'll bet there's galvanized running from the well to the pressure tank - it was drilled when i was a kid. The plumber did say he had test strips to test my water before he decided what to put in.
Thanks for warning about manganese, I'll keep that in mind. Do you think we can get decent tasting water??
test strips
Suppose you are unexplainably sick and you go to the pharnacy to buy some "test strips" to check your urine.
What will that tell you?
Compare those results to going to a doctor and letting him run the battery and send blood and urine to the lab.
The homeowner test strips won't tell you much for the water either. That is why I said to have it tested by someone who knows what they are looking for.
I have test kits stcked on the shelf here. I send the sample off to a lab with a check and indications of which test I am looking for, from simple coliform to minimal or complete mineral analysis. Costs range from $15 to 75. I get results back in a week or less.
When considering a treatment system, I have the treatment company run their own test and they nake recommendations for what kind of system to install. It is designed to handle whatever problem they find.
See, what I am getting at is that you are proceeding under the assumption you are testing for iron but there could be a number of things to treat for that only a more thorough test will tell you and you sure don't want to put in a $500 system that doesn't work when you need a $2500 system. Nor do you wnat to install a $3500 system when a $200 filter will do.
.
Excellence is its own reward!
Edited 12/2/2003 7:10:56 AM ET by piffin
Agreed. Get water quality tests done by a lab. Don't risk your life or your health.
Iron can be an indicator of contamination. If your water suddenly has a lot more iron in it than you remember when you were a kid, maybe some contamination has entered your aquifer. Microorganisms which eat waterborne contamination (like, say, gasoline spills or agricultural run-off etc.) can take insoluble ferric iron from the soils and reduce it to soluble ferrous iron. They start doing this as they start running out of oxygen (as they multiply due to the new food source and consume all the oxygen reaching the water from the surface).
Personally I wouldn't drink water from a reducing aquifer unless I had a good treatment system on it. That system would include something to oxidize the ferrous iron and any sulphide (the green sand or chlorinator options will both do this), a good multimedia filter to remove the resulting ferric iron, and a UV system to disinfect the water (especially if you don't have a chlorinator). UV kills stuff like giardia and cryptosporidium which chlorine doesn't kill- and both of those pesky parasites will make you plenty sick.
Moltenmetal had some of the same thoughts I did regarding why it might have changed since your childhood. The iron didn't get introduced, so what has made the always present iron mobile?
He mentioned a gasoline spill (I've cleaned up a lot of those) and that (or diesel) is a possibility. You might not find any from that particular well if the bacteria are eating it upgradient. But the change in water chemistry would explain the mobile iron.
Any other food source (oxygen demand) would too. A sugar solution (exceedingly unlikely, but I've put those in intentional to effect valance changes in dissolved metals). Poop (human, cow, etc) has a big oxygen demand and obviously can contain pathogens. Garden-variety e. coli. H7:0157 e. coli (the potentially deadly Jack-in-Box, Odwalla kind). Etc.
The addition of fertilizers, while not a food source, per se, can rev up a biomass to eat more stuff. So a check for nitrates, nitrites, potassium and phosphorus might be in order.
I wouldn't bring this up if everyone in your area has always had high iron. But the fact that it has changed over time makes me wonder.
David Thomas Overlooking Cook Inlet in Kenai, Alaska
I knew you guys would come through. Water testing has become a big deal in Ontario since we had 7 people die from E coli contamination of a well, so the labs are out there that will do a complete run.
Mom hd it tested recently for E coli and coliform, but that was it. It's groundsource, so i'm not worried about giardia & crypto (from what I've read, they're surface contaminants, the well is totally buried. No access unless we dig it up.
But there's all those other things that I didn't think about, plus the chemical changes going on. Agriculture, fish farming, all pull a lot more from the ground than it used to when I was a kid. I guess what we really fail to realize is the vast distance that an aquifer may spread underground. So just because we're not pulling a lot, doesn't mean someone else isn't dumping a lot of something.
The taste has been getting bad over the past couple of years, but I really thought it was cause Mom wasn't pulling enough to keep it fresh. Flawed thinking, I suppose.
I really don't want to 'soften' the water if I can avoid it, but iwould like to get it to a reasonable taste. I probably could learn to live with it, but it;s harder to get kids to drink it.
You just mentioned more reasons why testing before attempting a resolution is the way to go. Although you remember a good water supply years ago, water quality and ingredients can change dramatically over time and sometimes literally overnight. Earthquakes/ground tremors,a dropping water table or even the drilling of a well at a close neighbor can have devastating effects to wells and the water supply. Fissures can open allowing the introduction of materials previously isolated from that supply.
If you're near an agricultural area as we are, nitrates and nitrites always become a concern. The link I included in a previous post shows a media that can be used in a backwashing filter to remove them. But that media won't be applicable for iron removal needs or other filtering needs and so sometimes more than one filter with different filtering medias is required.
And if your water is turbid, that turbidity talks to you about what filtering media(s) can or can't be used to tackle other problems because it will effect the ability of some medias to do their job. And then there's PH of the water involved in choosing a media. Lots of factors involved in being truly successful, getting a hassle-free system and safe, clear good tasting water.
If you lick all the other problems and still the water doesn't have the taste you'd like (your kids will gladly drink), an activated charcoal filter as final treatment should remove any funky tastes or odors. These large capacity backwashing filter units can also be used as a large activated charcoal filter unit by filling it with such and leaving the controls set for no backwashing or you can install a large unit without a backwashing head. But frankly, I'd rather install a smaller charcoal filter unit on that drinking line and change out the filter insert more often since they should be changed at a minimum of every 6 months.
What I haven't mentioned here and I don't think I've seen mentioned is the possible need for a new well, but I'll bet it's crossed your mind. If the well is old, the casing may be shot and allowing ground water supply to enter or the filtering capacity of the well plume may be exhausted. Unfortunately, wells don't last forever.
Decent safe water is becoming harder to come by and something we're prone to taking for granted until it isn't there anymore.
Knowledge is power, but only if applied in a timely fashion.
Don't bet that your well, and all your neighbours' wells, are tight against surface contamination running down hole. For one thing, you don't know how many old wells haven't been abandoned properly in your area. Down-hole contamination from a leaking municipal well ended up with 7 dead and thousands very, very sick at Walkerton Ontario from E.coli 0157:H7. And if there's dog s^&t around, there's potential for crypto or giardia, even though your water is ground source.
If I were drinking country well water, I've have a UV unit. No question. You can get them from numerous places, but you should look at http://www.uvpure.com (or is that .ca?) for a good NSF-qualified unit. The technical guys behind this unit are geniuses- former co-workers of mine about 8 years ago now. Kills every known waterborne bug for pennies per thousand gallons treated- and unlike chlorinated water, there's no chloroform or other THMs to worry about. But no good unless you remove the iron which is the big source of taste problems etc. in your water.
Filtration alone won't remove ferrous iron, regardless how fine you filter it. You need to oxidize it to ferric first, either with chlorine, air or permanganate (i.e. greensand).
Piffin's certainly given you good advice. The first step is to find out just what's in there. How many PPM of ferric iron and how many PPM of ferrous iron and anything else that's of significance. Sulphur for one. Potential for arsenic exists, too. And manganese. Maybe fecal coliforms. You just don't know until you test. (Don't get alarmed over the mention of arsenic because if you have iron in your water, removing the arsenic becomes much easier and the same equipment you'd install to remove the iron will remove the vast majority of the arsenic along with the iron precipitate. A water softener will remove approx. 50% of what may remain.)
First thing I'd do is contact a local well drilling outfit because they'll either do the testing or know where to send the sample. Simple iron tests can usually be performed by the folks at your local plumbing supply house, but the investigation for other contaminants requires a lab set up. And that sample has to be taken following some specific procedures and guidelines, probably in a lab supplied container, and then hustled/mailed off to the lab in short order.
Hopefully, you'll be able to deal with everything via an automatic backwashing filter but don't be surprised if you need to mount a chlorinator on your well. Maybe, maybe not. But just which media you'll run in the backwashing filter will depend upon the results of the tests. Worst-case scenario would be the need of two filters in series. (See links below for filter media info.)
If you're coached or offered the option of installing a green sand filter instead of a chlorinator and a filter sand filter (they are not the same thing) to deal with just an iron problem………….I'd personally go for the latter combo, hands down. Green sand filters require potassium permanganate to regenerate and those units I've seen around here are usually troublesome. When they malfunction, you end up with purple water, purple clothes, purple dishes and a purple tub. Anyway, I've not been favorable impressed.
We have 4.5 PPM of ferrous iron in the wells around here. Installed a chlorinator to convert the ferrous iron to ferric iron and then we pull it out with a backwashing filter sand unit before the water hits the softener. Works great and there is virtually no maintenance. A 20 minute once every 6 months cleaning procedure that I won't go into here. I've installed a half-dozen of these set-ups in the area. Everyone is very pleased. You don't have to run a free-chlorine residual to get the job done and so you can't taste any chlorine on the water. No one knows unless you tell them.
http://www.apswater.com/page120.html
Your good advice reminds me of a story that happened here .
A freind of mine had a pain in his arm for 9 days and he felt bad . He had had two other heart attacks , but this was his third one causing damage over that amount of time. He had decided it wasnt one because it didnt feel like the other two. He told the doctor why he hadnt come in laying in ICU that day. The doctor said " and when did you become a doctor? "
Send the sample off and pay some cheap money as insurance. Go Piff!
Tim Mooney
Remind me again where you live. Your story sounds like my childhood in Glasgow, Montana. Our water came from shallow auqifers lying on coal seams, so besides the iron we had plenty of sulfur in the water. It smelled and tasted awful. Some people even claimed it gave them the runs. A glass of water would throw 1/8" of sediment over night. Not only did all the plumbing fixtures turn yellow, but so did all the light colored laundry. We referred to our Sunday white shirts as celestial orange.
If it was just the taste, I wouldn't fight with it. We all got used to it and even used to brag about how only the rugged pioneer types were tough enough to drink Glasgow water. But I can see how the staining and the minerals need to be dealt with.
I will say I don't think the galvanized supply line is the problem. As much iron as you're seeing, if it was coming from the pipe, the pipe would be gone by now.
Aside from what has already been mentioned, one question ?
Was any work done to the water lines? Including the well house?
If there was; do a visual inspection of all the pipe you can see. If you find any black iron pipe you've probably foud your source. In my area galvanised pipe is still in common use, without any problems except for "scale" build up.
Occasionally though I'll get a call from a home owner "suddenly" getting "rusty" colored water for a few seconds when the water is first turned on, or getting a strange taste, or getting staining.
A lot of times what I find is that the water lines have recently been worked on and somewhere in the cold water line (usuallly) is a single piece of "black iron" (not galvised pipe).
Just a thought maybe you'll get rid of the problem the "easy way".
Jim
A friend put one of these units in last year and is very happy. http://www.slowsandfilter.com/
The advantage is it is almost no maintenance and very simple.
Martagon,
I have REALLY bad (iron) water. The water out of the well is visibly brown. This is what I came up with, and it produces pretty much perfect water. (It has a slight blue hue in the white tub when full).
In series: 40 micron whole house filter (~7" dia.), 5 micron whole house, 2 micron (smaller) whole house, water softer set at 15 PPM.
I change the filters ~4-5 months. But the 40 gets 90% so I'm thinking of adding another in parallel to reduce the interval.
Now I have neighbors who were sold a (low?) maintenance iron filter and water softener set-up for $1300. after 4 years their water is like yours, And their (4 year old) washing machine is failing due to low pressure somewhere.
Jon
Jon,
Can't help but wonder what type of iron filter was installed at your neighbors and whether or not they're chlorinating. Around here, local plumbers will make recommendations for the treatment of water quality issues without any water tests or true understanding of the factors involved. They just wanna sell another unit and make some cash. And they do……to the unsuspecting. Since you didn't mention a chlorinator, I'm going to assume that there isn't one and that they were perhaps sold a green sand filter unit and now it's slugged, incapable of doing anymore effective filtering and the end result of that is what you describe. Bummer.
The fact is that around here, the green sand filter unit is still the one most often pushed by the local plumbers because the installation of one is initially cheaper than installing the system we have here and so the prospective customer is more likely to bite. And unfortunately, they do. And usually the customer is dazzled by the initial results and so happily pays the bill. But I've never known anyone nor heard of anyone who was truly satisfied with these types of filters over the long haul around here. Much grumbling and swearing results.
But, from the sounds of your description it's time for your neighbors to change out the green sand in that unit….again presuming that's what they have. If they have a different type of media, such as filter sand, filter ag or birm, there is a procedure that can be used to clean the media rather than replace it and that's much easier even though the filtering media is pretty darn cheap. I've never tried cleaning green sand, so I can't speak to the effectiveness or success of trying it. But if a media hasn't been left slugged for too long a period of time, cleaning it to restore its filtering capacity is a lot less hassle than replacement. I've cleaned ours here approx. every 6 months for 6 years or so and haven't yet replaced it. Still works like new.
Unfortunately, if the filter unit has been allowed to reach a condition where the target contaminant(s) is no longer being captured, it has now likely slugged the softener too. But the same cleaning procedure should work to restore that as well.
Knowledge is power, but only if applied in a timely fashion.
You have hit on quite a few good items surronding this issue. Top in my mind is the come on artists. Someone in Florida just sold my mother a system for five grand. She is on city water. The most she would need is a de-chorinator! Wait 'till I get down there and get my hands on that jerk.
Another is the new well idea. Too many people have a built in mental block against that and maybe it is important in some locals where a permit is hard or expensive to get for a well.
But I recently did a house inspection where the well turned out bad. We had the guy out to scope the casing with a camera and found it bad. Then he made a proposal for re-lining and a treatment system with a lot of variables on the cost but a potential of spending around $2500 or so.
Buyer and seller were looking at me for guidance and I just said, "And drilling a new well costs what? ...Pretty competitive cost.
Both options had a small chance of failure but the new well had higher positive potential. Seller decided to drill new.
The other issue with treatment or filtration systems is that they do need maintainance. I know where a few expensive systems are probably not functioning because of neglect..
Excellence is its own reward!
Yea, I love those hoodwinkers. Sometimes they come with a name on their shirt that induces unfounded confidence or the willingnessto spend way more $$$ than is necessary for identical equipment. Companies that include prefixes like "eco" or similar alway seem to hypnotize folks into thinking it means thier getting something extra special and that's why it costs more.
Same total system I install for around $2200- $2400 bucks here including labor, one of these companies sells and installs for $4500. Yikes! And the equipment they install is cheesy to say the least. Poorly built and flimsy.
Oh well. (Pun intended)
Knowledge is power, but only if applied in a timely fashion.
I wasn't sure if I should admit this, but the scenario you describe was us, only we didn't drill the new well first.
We had a lot of iron in our water and we installed a system called Chem Free.
http://www.macclean.com/chem-free.htm
It worked, but there were other problems with the well and we ultimately drilled a new one within a year and thankfully did not need the filter. It would have been much cheaper to have looked into that option FIRST rather than spend $900 on a system that is now sitting in our basement (as in, not hooked up).
Iron in the water is miserable. It ruins cloths FAST along with fixtures and everything else in the house. I also had orange hair for my wedding, which I wasn't too keen on. It made my hair feel wierd too. I ended up cutting most of it off as soon as we had the new well.
My point is that it is worth the money to fix it. Just figure out the best way to do it. It might be a new well.
Piffin I know that you AND Goldhiller are familiar with this area. Lots of iron in the water. Our problem was probably made worse from an old gold mine on the property and rusting old mining equipment upstream. A new, deeper well took care of the problem.
Edited 12/3/2003 3:16:13 PM ET by Paula
All of the mining out there has disturbed minerals and metals in the water supply. Every time I see the coors commercial about pure Rocky Mtn Water for the basis of the brew, I think of some of the things I know is in that water.
I drank from the Colorado river once when my mind was on vacation and spent a month going to the doctor's office regularly, LOL
There are a few wells here that have arsenic and radon in the water. good wells otherwise, except for the things you can't see or taste. Glad you got yours in better shape, but did you test it too?
The way I understand it, manganese is often rpesent in many of the same water formations that iron is, but that neither really shows up until exposed to the air when it forms compounds with O2, and that the manganese is really the more pernicious of the two for causing problems. I also discovered that there is a study linking excess manganese with depression and other kinds of mental instability. I guess too much of it in the body can block serotonin which controls moods and mental balance. It cited accounts of people who are exposed to it environmentally such as welders and machinists, who get far more than one typically sees in well water.
I figure an inexpensive test is as much fun as a night out at the movies for the same cost, more or less.
It does sound like your situation was surface iron oxides and not deep iron in suspension though.
I al.
Excellence is its own reward!
That iron problem was all at our old house. The new house still hasn't been tested, but it has something in it, just not iron. Currently drinking bottled water. Remember Eldorado Springs? Best water on earth. :-)
They say that the water that falls off my roof belongs to coors, at least that is what I've heard. I'm not allowed to collect it, I do know that much because it belongs to the downstream users. I've heard that in our case and our drainage, that is Coors. Think about THAT the next time you're drinking a "Silver Bullet" LOL!
Paula
Pardon my illustration but what I think about is my great grandfather's statement, that "...if I can't go out off my back porch to take a whiz, It's time to move further back into the woods.".
Excellence is its own reward!
Our nearest city municipal water system has extremely sophisticated testing lab and provides testing and the little special bottles to all who ask for them.
We have our wells tested yearly by them and they thankfully come in clear every time. Cost of comprehensive testing for all kinds of substances, organic or not, is $15.-.
The state uses the cheap testing to keep track of all the wells and their status, along with the driller's and well technician's records.
You may want ot check if you have any such lab handy.
The basic test here is $15 and is done at a private lab. An extensive teet is done for more like 75.
Excellence is its own reward!
Same sort of deal here until a few years ago. Any county resident used to be able to take a sample to the municipal water treatment plant's very comprehensive lab setup and get tested for everything under the sun.........for no charge. Those were the days. They're gone here. Private labs now.
Knowledge is power, but only if applied in a timely fashion.
Yes, was free until 5 years ago here too, then they started charging.
I think they run all tests thru the same extensive program, their own and those submitted by the public, or so the pages of results look.
In one well, our water is very clean except that it has 20 times more calcium than average. The others are average in all measures.
There are some local wells that are contaminated by the nuclear disassembly line's chemicals they used many years ago, before they knew not to dispose of them as they did and others are contaminated if there are feeding pens nearby and old open wells around that leak.
Every area has it's own different situation.
After reading all these posts with the many possibilities, it seems best if that initial poster tests the well thoroughly before deciding what to do with it.
After reading all these posts with the many possibilities, it seems best if that initial poster tests the well thoroughly before deciding what to do with it.
Hi Ruby I think you're right about the thorough testing. What I thought was a simple iron overload sounds as though it could be a lot more complex. I hadn't even considered some of the scenarios, the implications of other users drawing down the water table.
I know that a 'compete' test of the water at one of the labs is about $450. I sit on the board of our local daycare, and we are required (after Walkerton, see above) to have a full test, i think it's every 3 months. They just changed the requirement from yearly to more frequently. (We also have to have daily, monthly, etc.)
I'll talk to our supervisor at the daycare and get a run-down on what tests get down each time. It really makes sense as I read all this to find out exactly what we're dealing with before we start putting in filters. Sigh, I think I caught a whiff of sulphur today. Please say it isn't so.
But I just love living on the home farm again. i bought some chickens, ooops, wrong forum. :^)