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I know at least one of the regular posters here does bathtub refinishing. I hope he (or someone else in the know) can tell me: how do you remove iron stains from a refinished tub? You can't seem to use any acids or bleach or abrasives or much of anything to clean a refinished tub. So what...

I'm thinking of having an old cast iron tub refinished with, oh, say, "Miracle Method", or some such. We have high iron in our water and all the old porcelain fixtures are quite orange. Has anyone lived with a refinished fixture and this type of water? How many showers did you take before the...

Central NC. Our water table is very high (everyone has ponds!). Digging down just a couple feet will often find water. The local well guy I talked to this week said that given the age of the well, it was almost certainly dug, un-cased, and prone to groundwater contamination. He said it was...

Okay, let's presume we can find out what kind of metal it is...is there a type of metal which can withstand chlorine? And then, aren't you also saying that the chlorine is hard on the innards of the well pump too? Oh, and the pH is testing around 6.7, 6.8, so there's that.

Probably. The house was built in 1937, so you have to suspect that the well was installed at that time. Whether or not it has a "casing" is not really known--probably not in the way wells are "cased" today. There is a steel pipe which pokes up out of the soil. That is all we know.

Ah okay, but we have an above-ground jet pump. Would the same damages accrue?

After reading gobs of postings here about chlorinating well water--I'm wondering why some of you seem to be against in-well chlorination? Does it develop chlorine-resistant bacteria? After much testing and research, we are considering in-well pellet chlorination to remove high iron...

I would just like to thank those of you who have taken the time to answer this middle-aged lady's (dumb) questions in the last few weeks. As a result of your patience, I have adjusted the well pump so that it no longer turns on at the slightest call for water. As a result of my reading of old...

Agreed (or rather, I'd agree to anything which keeps me from having to crawl under the house again). However, when I bought my previous house, the inspector guesstimated the water heater was about 8 years old. Never had a bit of problem with it in the SIXTEEN more years that I lived there...

Ah yes, the old "don't fix it if it ain't broke". That's precisely what I was thinking too. Perhaps it's best that all the sludge stays where it is rather than flowing to things like my new $600 washing machine! Water heaters are cheaper....

Crawling under the house to deal with the well pump has led me to take a look at the water heater. I was going to drain it because I doubt the previous owners of the house ever did. However, the plastic valve is stuck closed! I'm afraid to wail on it for fear of breaking it. Would spraying...

Thank you all for your help! Yes, I think the tank is 20 gallons and, as I said, by rapping on the side you can clearly hear a difference. The water appears to be 1/3 up from the bottom. The pump is above-ground and is rated at 1/2 HP, but I don't know what the flow rate of the well might be...

I did notice that the tank does have just one pipe at the bottom, where the drain spigot is. I also noticed that the pressure in the tank, as read by my tire pressure gauge, always matched the pressure gauge on the well pump. So, I did begin to suspect that I wasn't actually reading the...

In case anyone has a similar problem someday and wants to know what I did--- I am cautiously reporting success in adjusting our well pump to cycle a lot less than it has. My first foray under the house seemed to confirm that the pressure tank was okay--water only partway up inside, as I...

Just returned from the crawlspace. Tank is a "gould hydro tank" or so it says. Pressure at the valve reads 38 PSI on my tire gauge. Well pump gauge itself also reads 38 PSI. Rapping on side of pressure tank suggests that water level is about 1/3 up. The system is resting quietly and nothing...

Unsure about the type of tank. Will crawl under the house (ugh!) when it warms up a bit and find out. I've got a really great article I found about how to add air to a tank and have located my bicycle pump, so maybe I can actually fix this myself! Thanks for letting me know that our...

Well, I've been googling for a half hour and have read the stickies at the top of this forum and STILL cannot find an answer to: What exactly is "normal" well pump cycling? Ours turns on just as soon as you withdraw even a half cup of water from any fixture. During a shower, it turns on...

I'm trying to test a dryer outlet and neither my multimeter nor my el-cheapo receptacle tester has prongs seemingly long enough to make contact deep inside the outlet where the juice is. Am I just using them wrong or do I need to purchase Yet Another Tester? I toyed with the idea of...

We are replacing PB pipe which runs from the crawlspace, through an exterior wall, and to the kitchen sink. The PB was connected to perfectly lovely copper pipe (1/2") which they chopped out and left lying there. The pH of our water is 6 which may explain why they got rid of the copper...