ffish
New Member
Hi, I am looking at buying a new water softener and potentially an iron removal system. I have been doing some research (including talking to different water treatment companies) but I am stuck now on how to deal with sequestered iron in the water. Here my situation: I am on a community well. We have very hard water and also lots of iron in the water.
Hardness: 20 grains per gallon
Iron: 7 ppm
The municipality started to sequester the iron a few years ago by adding polyphosphate to the water at the pump station to prevent the ferrous iron (clear/in solution) to precipitate as ferric iron (particulate).
As the sequestering does not address the taste of the water and also does not completely remove the influence of the iron in the water, I would still like to get rid of the iron. However, I am not sure what the impact of the sequestering is on the iron removal downstream. I was told by some companies that the ‘coated’ iron would just go through a standard iron filter and also the softener (which in general would be able to take out some soluble iron).
1. I understand that standard iron filters try to oxidize the soluble iron into particulate iron and filter the particles out afterwards. Will this approach still work with sequestered iron – where the main task of the sequestering was to prevent oxidization?
2. I talked to one company that just released a combined water softener and phosphate removal system based on a mix of 2 resins in one tank. It is supposed to first remove the phosphate and then let the softener take out some of the iron. This sounds good in theory but I have about 7ppm iron in the water and I think the common understanding is that a water softener can deal with about 3ppm only.
Most water treatment companies were not able to answer my questions, in fact, most of them did not know about the impact of the phosphate addition to their equipment at all – or they just stated that the iron filter ‘would get out everything’. I find this very surprising since I understand that this concept of iron sequestering is widely used.
Does anybody have any experience with this sequestered iron and standard equipment or maybe can recommend a different solution? Thanks!
Hardness: 20 grains per gallon
Iron: 7 ppm
The municipality started to sequester the iron a few years ago by adding polyphosphate to the water at the pump station to prevent the ferrous iron (clear/in solution) to precipitate as ferric iron (particulate).
As the sequestering does not address the taste of the water and also does not completely remove the influence of the iron in the water, I would still like to get rid of the iron. However, I am not sure what the impact of the sequestering is on the iron removal downstream. I was told by some companies that the ‘coated’ iron would just go through a standard iron filter and also the softener (which in general would be able to take out some soluble iron).
1. I understand that standard iron filters try to oxidize the soluble iron into particulate iron and filter the particles out afterwards. Will this approach still work with sequestered iron – where the main task of the sequestering was to prevent oxidization?
2. I talked to one company that just released a combined water softener and phosphate removal system based on a mix of 2 resins in one tank. It is supposed to first remove the phosphate and then let the softener take out some of the iron. This sounds good in theory but I have about 7ppm iron in the water and I think the common understanding is that a water softener can deal with about 3ppm only.
Most water treatment companies were not able to answer my questions, in fact, most of them did not know about the impact of the phosphate addition to their equipment at all – or they just stated that the iron filter ‘would get out everything’. I find this very surprising since I understand that this concept of iron sequestering is widely used.
Does anybody have any experience with this sequestered iron and standard equipment or maybe can recommend a different solution? Thanks!
