Working on a house that has well water that is so rusty that it stops the operation of the water softner.
I am thinking of some sort of whole house iron filter just before the softner. I installed the softner a few years ago and talked to the sales person and he said just install the softner. Now the softner get pluged up with rust and the valves will not operate to recycle.
What type of Iron filter would help??????????
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Replies
It might be worth trying a plain old water filter ahead of the softener. I know ours catches a lot of iron.
If you get a filter, get one of the oversized ones, with a cartridge that 5-6 inches across. Looks a bit like a pool filter (but don't try to use a pool filter instead). The large filter will last at least 4x as long between filter changes.
Rusty water
The well may have a problem with Iron bacteria. Treating is sometimes easy, cheap and straight forward, Get in touch with the extension service, probably via your local land grant college or university. They should be able to put you in touch with a testing lab that can confirm if the problem bacterial. If it is, the treatment will be to dilute and circulate household bleach through the well and pipes for 12 to 24 hours and then flush the system (not into a septic tank). The objective is to kill the critters in the pipes and to kill as many in the aquifer around the well. The problem will come back, but usually not right away.
We had a well with very high iron content. If fact the water treatment company said it was one of the highest they ever tested. The interesting thing was though, when you filled a clean white bucket with water straight out of the well, it was crystal clear . . . but if you came back in ten minutes, the water would look like orange-red glop.
The problem is that the water at the bottom of the well was not exposed to oxygen thus it was in it's ferrous state but when it stood in the white bucket, then it became oxidized into a ferric state. (I could have the ferric/ferrous thing backwards, I can't remember) Anyway, we had to put in a rather complex system in the basement to deal with it.
First the water stood in a sedimentation tank where a solution of bleach and water was pumped in based on the flow demand. Most of the iron precipitated out of solution here. That tank flushed automatically for maybe twenty minutes every night at three in the morning, with the precipitate going into the sewer. Then the water went thru a carbon filter to remove any bleach still in it. That back washed every other night. Then it went to a water softener which I used to stock with iron fighting salt pellets. This was to soften the water and remove any remaining iron. Then I think it went thru a regular cartridge type filter and finally out to the water system.
It was a bit of a pain to keep running and adjusted, but it did remove all traces of iron. I know they also have systems where a chlorine pellet dispenser sits right on top of the well and a pellet is dropped every so often based on the water flow. That system was proposed to us by one water guy but I didn't like the idea of all that iron precipitate building up over the years at the bottom of the well. Maybe that was not rational on my part but it just didn't seem right.
Good luck. Orange stains in all the toilets and tubs and washers are certainly not attractive.
rust stains
We had a similar problem, most of it was particulate iron suspended in the water. The filter was such a pain that we started using "Super Iron Out" instead of bleach in the wash and added about a tablespoon to the toilet tank a couple of times a month.
No more little rust spots in the clothes, no crud in the bottom of the toilet tank and sparkly clean bowls. It's a chemical that converts the iron to a salt which is dissolved and washed away. In the 10 years we lived there, it only wrecked one shirt. If anyone wants to try it, make sure you read all the directions. It is dangerous if mixed with bleach.