Well water treatment

[WiltonRanch]

We have hard water with iron.
I have a Kinetico softener. It is completely mechanical and is a double tank setup. From initial install to first major problem lasted 15 years. Put a rebuilt head on it a year ago for $400 and hopefully good for another 15 years. Secret of low/no maintenance is with the double tanks. With the dual tank it regenerates itself with softened water. It keeps the control head from plugging up with iron.

Good point the Aztec is a single tank. Now my bloody luck it’ll plug after I read this damnit!

[farmaholic]

We use chlorination to precipitate iron and manganese out. A liquid chlorination system. The whole system is a closed system pressurized with the submersible pump in a 190 foot well. Diluted Hypochorite(12% undiluted) is injected into the raw water line after the pressure tank before it enters two holding tanks, one is 190 and the other 120 US gallons(into the bottom of the first tank then out the top to the bottom of the second tank and then out the top to the filters.... this way you are always drawing off the top of the tanks away from the precipitate which will help keep the filters cleaner). Most of the precipitate comes out in the first tank and a bit in the second, tank bottoms are purged every once in awhile to remove the precipitate. From the second tank the water enters a sand filter, then a carbon filter,(these are not "small" filters the carbon filter takes one cubic foot or carbon medium plus the rest of the bed, both filters are the same size) then for soft water it goes to the softener. "Hard" water is drawn off the system before it reaches the softener and the only tap in the house on hard water is the drinking water tap. Everything else goes through the softener.... toilet water too.

As I said the system isn't perfect and there is a little slippage of manganese because manganese is fairly hard to remove. Chlorine is a strong oxidizer and that is why it works pretty good on our water. We had tried a greensand filter but because of the combined levels of iron and manganese the filter was overwhelmed. An air injection system supposedly doesn't work well on manganese.

If I remember correctly our water is about 60 grains hard.

We have no livestock to worry about.

Do your City Cousins still think water is "free" on the farm....LOL.

I joke around thinking that the old well hand pumps had bird shit on the top of them from birds perching on them.... I'm sure the odd turd made it into the well..... nobody died around here from that. Now who would have ever thought you would see as much water in a pop cooler as different flavors of pop? Or that people would be hauling water around in 20 liter jugs because the municipally treated water from the tap wasn't good enough to drink "for no apparent reason". Or communities that decided to go reverse osmosis(RO) for the whole town because of too much arsenic or uranium..... in amounts so small it is hard to believe anything could possibly go wrong. I've been drinking water off the same aquifer as my hometown that went RO and I don't think I'm being poisoned from arsenic or glowing in the dark from the uranium either.

Explore all your options before committing to anything.

We had an pellet chlorinator on an old steel cased well...... I think it ****ed that well up, couldn't get the pump out of it! We had to drill a new well with a plastic casing.... Don't do that to a steel cased well!

[Jay-mo]

Good point the Aztec is a single tank. Now my bloody luck it’ll plug after I read this damnit!

Your doing pretty good if you have had 10 years of trouble free operation. Anyone I know around here with just a cheap softener has to have them ripped apart and clean all the iron crap out every year or so.

[hobbyfrmr]

Chlorine is a strong oxidizer and corrosive to existing organic residue on old pipes. This dissolves the old crud that has collected inside your copper pipes then you get pin hole leaks in old copper in your home.

There is some kind of water fear roaming around rural Sask. I was on town council where the water has been consistent and tested for the last 50 years. The water treatment plant operator has to test daily and document. Monthly water reports are presented to town council and provincial regulators.
I understand the facility is very near its depreciated lifespan.
There has always been ammonia in the water. World Health Organization and Health Canada documents claim there are no health risks associated to ammonia in water. Regulator says ammonia antagonizes/masks chlorine and disinfection may not be satisfactory.
First solutions was to reach "break point". Add more chlorine until there is enough to offset the "masking" effect of ammonia. We gradually increased and monitored this action until we were adding up to 4X more chlorine to the water than we normally would. First, people started to complain about the smell in their homes. Near the peak chlorine, my fixtures at home near the toilet had a faint green tinge.
Then the one inch water service lines to the homes started leaking. Each excavation the copper line had pinholes on them like a lawn sprinkler. Then the oldest homes started with pinhole leaks in the house. Then the newest homes with the cheapest/lightest copper started pinholes.

Just be aware that this maybe a problem with treatment systems.

Regulators want ammonia removed from public water. Ergo town needs a new water treatment plant.
We have the 2 greensand filters then chlorinate filtered water when going out to public.

My research suggested zeolite filter medium in the filters would solve the ammonia problem . Zeolite is A common filter medium in water softeners.
Another application for zeolite is fish tank filters. Fish are extremely sensitive to ammonia and die quickly. Ergo the zeolite filter.
Our town reservoir is basically a huge fish tank. It has been about 5 years ago so I forgot the math, but the research I presented suggested that all we had to do was replace about 20% of one filter medium with zeolite to capture and remove the ammonia .
When I left council, the regulators and engineering companies were having meetings with all these little towns and villages encouraging new build R/O plants. Frequently with R/O systems you require more lagoon capacity which....of course....needs to be engineered.
I did have a chance to present my findings at that meeting. The engineers said they would look at it then continued with the R/O presentation. I never did go looking for validation of my information. I do continue to see articles about how different industries use zeolite to treat contaminated wastewater before they release back into nature.
I apologize for the hijack but this has always stuck with me because I sensed (probably falsely) some kind of unackowledged alignment between regulator and engineering company. This maybe false because, as a councillor I was defensive and not receptive about imposing a $450,000 water treatment plant for 125 homes when the answer may be quite simple.

I think Zeolite it the cats meow for water treatment.

I just did a fast and rough read on this article and I think this is what I am trying to describe.

Page 19 - #6 and beyond.

https://cdn.intechopen.com/pdfs-wm/41947.pdf

[blackpowder]

Interesting posts. Thanx.

Just heard on radio. Californians paying >$30/gal for 'raw' water! Hilarious.

[farmaholic]

Why do you consider that post a hijack hobby....it's interesting.

I also heard RO water needs to be rebalanced....what do they add? Caustic soda to de-acidify(????). Then the community has to chlorinate again anyway because its sold to the public.

I might be wrong about the caustic soda....can anyone verify?

When I'm thirsty seems I can't drink enough RO water to quench my thirst. Empty water.

[hobbyfrmr]

Why do you consider that post a hijack hobby....it's interesting.

I also heard RO water needs to be rebalanced....what do they add? Caustic soda to de-acidify(????). Then the community has to chlorinate again anyway because its sold to the public.

I might be wrong about the caustic soda....can anyone verify?

When I'm thirsty seems I can't drink enough RO water to quench my thirst. Empty water.

The subject was home water systems and I went on a tangent about a town system.
I didnt like the R/O presentation because its very wasteful and everyone else from 3 town councils seemed to be very agreeable to it all because it was the only option provided. Kind of like sheep.

Agreed on the empty water opinion. We are scaring ourselves out of natural water. Its a whole new subject to get anxious about....until your thirsty enough.

[farmaholic]

Resurrecting this for samhill. Last year when we had our dugout water tested for spraying suitability I picked up containers from the Sask Prov Lab to check my well water, General Chemistry/water panel raw and treated, and for E.Coli and coliform bacteria raw and treated. Also the metals Health and Toxicity panel raw.

The bacteria test showed undetectable for both raw and treated. The heavy metals are not a problem...all well below the Sask guideline values....even the arsenic or uranium that I thought was going to be high.

Our biggest problems are iron and manganese. Iron went from 4.6 to <0.1 that's from 15.3 times higher than the guideline(<0.3)to 3 times lower. Manganese went from 0.72 to <0.01 that's from 14.4 times higher than the guideline(<0.05) to 5 times lower. The treatment system is working well.

Hardness is a bit of an issue here as well. Raw water is 52 grains hard(892 mg/l CaCO2) and after the softener it is less than 1 grain hard(7 mg/l). The efficiency of the softener is helped alot by the pretreatment before it, the removal of iron and manganese. I've heard of alot harder water than we're dealing with.

The only other issue is the dissolved sulphate is a bit over the guidelines but would either need to be removed by reverse osmosis or an ion exchanger(like a softener but used to remove the sulphate). The ion exchanger would regenerate using both hydrochloric acid and caustic soda....the business I use for service and advice said no one uses them and opts for RO instead because the systems have dropped in price and have become more efficient and cost effective to operate and maintain over time. The level were dealing with isn't a problem for us....we will leave well enough alone.

As mentioned in an earlier post.....identify the problems in your water and choose a method to deal with them. Having the water tested by a non biased party would be a good place to start. Good luck with your decision. You can get some real satisfying results.

[checking]

Oh no, farmaholic!

I hope you discarded that pellet chlorinator, and did not installed it on your PVC well. Those pellets have 25% clay in them which does not dissolve in water. It builds up, pellet by pellet, on top of your pump, clay locking it from being pulled. It will do the same in your new well. They are the worse thing you can do for a well.

[farmaholic]

Oh no, farmaholic!

I hope you discarded that pellet chlorinator, and did not installed it on your PVC well. Those pellets have 25% clay in them which does not dissolve in water. It builds up, pellet by pellet, on top of your pump, clay locking it from being pulled. It will do the same in your new well. They are the worse thing you can do for a well.

Nope....threw that piece of shit away. I explained what our system is in an earlier post.