Credit where credit is due. Water treatment

[Snipe Hunter]

I'm plugging an online water treatment equipment supplier who I have used a couple times with great success.

We have real nasty well water. Not exactly sure why because the rest of the homes on the street aren't too bad. We're about 300 yards off the Chesapeake and our soil is sand. I can dig a 36 inch post hole in about two minutes... all sand.

Our water is very high iron, low PH and brown and stinks to high heaven.

Almost 2 years I sent water sample results to Ohio Pure Water and they recommended a system and filters. We bough it and it shipped to our doorstep. We have great water now. This is the second system we bought from them. Both different because of different water issues in each house. A few weeks ago we noticed the smell coming back and slightly discolored water. I called Ohio Pure Water and they walked me through a couple trouble shooting exercises. He recommended I pull a venturi jet and run a 1/16 trill through it to clean it out. I did and it worked . No charge. He didn't try to sell me a new part or anything. This isn't the first time I've had to call them for help. When you have a well and want perfect water, there's always something..

their prices are well below local suppliers and the service is great. They've never tried to sell me anything I didn't need and everything is based on the water quality test.

Anyway, here's a link if you ever need to fix your water.

Ohio Pure Water

[Guest]

I can second that.   I am sure I heard of them here, years ago.
I bought my softener and whole house filter set up from them easy peasy and much cheaper than I could get locally.

I have hard water, but it's pretty good on taste.  

What component did you have to fix?

[crokett™]

You've been in that house almost 2 years already? Wow. My old house had high iron, but we didn't have the other problems you had. The only real issue it caused me was the pool water was colored when the chlorine hit it. Rather than spend 6-800.00 on a treatment system I just used sequestrant. I wish I could dig post holes through sand instead of clay, rocks, tree roots and stuff that I imagine is like caliche, although I've never actually had persona experience with caliche. What I have locally isn't really clay and isn't really solid rock.

[Snipe Hunter]

I can second that.   I am sure I heard of them here, years ago.
I bought my softener and whole house filter set up from them easy peasy and much cheaper than I could get locally.

I have hard water, but it's pretty good on taste.  

What component did you have to fix?

Yes, I heard of them here too. I'm sure of it.

Because of what I've learned from them, I'm very critical when anybody tries to solve their water problems without a good lab test of their water. Everybody thinks they need a water softener. Culligan has them trained.

First the silt. We have 4 filters. We run two 20 micron paper filters and two 5 micron charcoal filter in parallel. I rotate replacement filters clockwise, Once a month. So it takes 4 months to change all the filters. The filter cans came from Lowes or Depot. I buy the filters through Amazon.

Then it runs through a calcite media tank full of crushed marble, this adjusts the PH to where it doesn't eat away my plumbing fixtures.. I top it off about every 10 weeks after siphoning a layer of mud off the top. It's not as bad as it sounds. I had the same unit at the old house, just with a different valve head.

Then it runs through a Green Sand / Potassium Permanganate (Pot Perm) filter. It works like a salt tank water softener but instead of plastic beads in the tank, it has green sand and instead of salt it uses the Pot-Perm to backwash. The tank has a float valve just like a salt tank but it's only 3 gallons. I dump in a quart bottle of powdered Pot Perm about once a month. Pot-Perm is an oxidizer which washes the green sand during the backwash cycle. This is the unit that failed. Pot Perm leaves a purple/black residue and that's what clogged the venturi jet.

I also put in an aluminum/zinc anode in the water heater. This helps keep the stinky bacteria down in the hot water.

It takes a week or two to get it water quality back to normal because the crappy water gets in the water heater and stinks up the pipes. It's all good now though. I could drain the water heater but I didn't.

[Goatman]

What size are those pre-filters?

[Snipe Hunter]

10" by about 4.5". Four of these.

[Goatman]

Okay. I have three 4.5x20 in series. How did you test your water?

[Snipe Hunter]

You wouldn't have a link to your filters would you? I like the idea of 20". Different micron sizes?

I used a cheap kit from Home Depot. It included PH test strips. Bacteria test, Iron test and some other things. Bacteria, Iron and PH were all out of whack. And it was brown so I knew it needed filtering.

I also checked flow rate by setting a 5 gallon bucket in the basement sink and timing how long it took to fill with cold water.