Katalox Light not working very well

[diggity]

So, very long story very short - I posted here some months ago about our lousy water which was really high in iron. I managed to get it under control, but as luck would have it, then something underground changed (probably because of the extreme drought here in central MA), and our iron concentration went from bad to extremely, stratospherically, cosmically, even comically awful. So we finally decided to drill a new well. The new water is much better, but unfortunately, it still has iron in it (about 18 ppm). Lab results for the old and new wells are below, though they aren't important for the question I'm about to ask.

My question is regarding our Katalox Light filter, which doesn't seem to be working very well. It's not a mechanical problem - I've been all over the unit and it is working fine. It's the media itself, which is barely removing any iron at all.

Problem #1: What I've found (and I think it's pretty interesting) is that KL does something to the iron which is actually counter productive:

If I fill a plastic bottle with raw water (KL in bypass mode, so no treatment whatsoever), then add hydrogen peroxide, it will immediately turn orange, and then the rust particles will settle to the bottom within an hour or so.

If I fill a plastic bottle with water that has been treated by the KL, then add hydrogen peroxide, it will immediately turn orange, same as above... BUT... what happens next is interesting... it takes DAYS, not hours to settle out. The rust particles must be so small that they stay in suspension for a lot longer.

I think this might be part of the problem we're having with the KL. It somehow changes the iron atoms so that they don't clump together very easily when oxidized. The iron that does get oxidized then sails right through my filtration equipment because the particles are so small.

Problem #2: The KL is clearly not oxidizing much iron. This is evidenced by the fact that I have to add peroxide to the bottle to get the water to turn orange. If the KL were oxidizing it all, I wouldn't have to add peroxide. I know now that this is because KL and other similar media don't actually oxidize anything... they catalyze a reaction between iron and oxygen that is already present in the water. If you don't have any oxygen in the water, you won't get any iron removal. I did not know this when I purchased the KL system, and honestly, I think the companies that sell KL units should be more up-front about this.

So my question is what to do next? We have a new high capacity softener on order which will probably help with all of this. But I'd like to remove as much iron as possible before the softener. I have injected Peroxide before (on the old well), but I was hoping to not have to do it again, in part because we may be selling the house in a few years and I think a Stenner pump and all its associated hoses and wires would scare off any prospective buyers. I desperately want to simplify. Is there any other media that I can use instead of KL? It looks to me like similar media (Pyrolox, Filox, etc.) all work the same way, which is to say they don't do diddly squat unless there is dissolved oxygen already present. Is there some media that doesn't require DO? KDF, maybe? Greensand?

Incidentally, I shocked the new well with peroxide (Neutra-Sul) and it did indeed help for a couple days. But I don't want to have to do that all the time either.

Thanks in advance!

 

[diggity]

Just realized I forgot to include the test results:


Old, New
Coliform 0, 0
Fecal 0, 0
Sodium 157 mg/L, 46.27 mg/L
Potassium 6.45 mg/L, 7.99 mg/L
Iron 132 mg/L, 18.27 mg/L
Manganese 4.7 mg/L, 2.2 mg/L
Magnesium 39.57 mg/L, 33.63 mg/L
Calcium 252.22 mg/L, 325.46 mg/L
Arsenic 0, 0
Lead 0, 0
zinc 0.16 mg/L, 0
pH 5.32, 6.65
Turbidity 200, 78.6
Color 150 CU, 739 CU
Odor ND, 2.0 TON
Conductivity 2993, 1523
TDS 1795.8 mg/L, 913
Sediment Present, Present
Alkalinity 20 mg/L, 60 mg/L
Chlorine 0, 0
Chloride 426 mg/L, 193.22 mg/L
Hardness 792.7 mg/L, 951 mg/L
Nitrate 4.18 mg/L, 0
Nitrite 0, 0
Ammonia 10 mg/L, 1.32 mg/L
Sulfate 534 mg/L, 557.75 mg/L

 

[Sponsor]

 

[Reach4]

Iron 132 mg/L, 18.27 mg/L
Manganese 4.7 mg/L, 2.2 mg/L

Wow! That is some high iron. My iron is less than 0.5, and I treat that. 132 ppm is serious stuff.
I don't remember you posting that number before, but I may have missed it. I know you were experimenting with a softener first system.

You had been considering a big atmospheric tank previously with air injection previously. It sounds to me as if a peroxide injection followed by a big contact/settling tank as a front end would be good, and take less room than an atmospheric tank.

 

[diggity]

Yup, you have a good memory Reach4! Several times I almost went the atmospheric storage tank route, but we decided to pull the trigger on a new well instead. I hope time proves it to be the right decision! Looking back, I'm not exactly sure when the iron got so high on the old well. It seemed like it got markedly worse this past autumn, but it may have been creeping up even a year ago.

As a side note, the new well is 345 feet deep. The old one was (I think) about 150. When he drilled the new one, he encountered and went through a lens of really nasty water between about 20-100 feet. Then he found what seemed to be better water at about 340 or so. He put in 60 feet of casing. I'm not sure why he didn't put in more casing - seems like he might have been able to isolate the known lousy water if he would have put in an extra 40 feet of casing - maybe he didn't know what was what at the time because everything was all mixed together. He says we can install a Jazwell Seal at about 100 feet, in the hope of separating the bad from the good, but there's no guarantee that it would help, because for one thing we don't even know for sure that the lower aquifer is 100% good. The 18 ppm that we have now could be coming from the upper (known lousy) aquifer, and working its way down, or it could be coming from the bottom aquifer. Don't know. Plus, the Jazwell installation would cost $2K and I'm not convinced that it wouldn't leak. So we're not doing the Jazwell - at least not now.

 

[Reach4]

I hope it works out nicely. I wonder how much more it would have cost to get 346 feet of casing. Knowing you were going through strata with known problem water, that would have seemed to be good. How large diameter is the casing?

 

[diggity]

Thanks - I think the casing diameter is pretty standard - looks like about 8 inches? I'm not sure how deep they can pound casing, and if he could have gotten it all the way to the bottom or not. But he said he does sometimes go to 100 ft. To his credit, he might have been trying to save us some money, as casing costs $18/foot. But I'll always wonder if things would have been any different had he cased all the way to 100' or so.