Rural water - doing things right

[Trepidation]

Hello,

I have a place on rural water that I ripped out the water heater, canister filter, and old water softener. The canister appeared to have become a bacteria farm from sitting too long and the softener was very 1970's and didn't appear to have been serviced ever. The hot water had a very, bad smell, which after asking my neighbors it seemed to be an issue isolated to my place. Not sure if this is from the house sitting empty for so long.

I'd like to start assembling things with new equipment and parts, and I don't know what I can or should test for. By the signs in the tub, heavy scale and iron stains on top of them. Eventually everything is getting replaced, I'd like to make sure any new appliances or fixtures have a degree of protection before they are installed.

What do I need to test for, if for anything just to know where to start? I've spoken with water testing places before when dealing with my primary residence, but they usually don't have any suggestions, just questions I don't have answers for. What is the fastest way to get results?

 

[Reach4]

Piped in water, or do you have your own well?

 

[Sponsor]

 

[Trepidation]

Piped in water. Not my well, small town municipal well.

No cool water treatment facility. Fortunately it is a modern install and it passed all the "it will not kill you right away" tests from the state.

 

[Reach4]

Piped in water. Not my well, small town municipal well.

No cool water treatment facility. Fortunately it is a modern install and it passed all the "it will not kill you right away" tests from the state.

Ask what the hardness is and/or get a Hach 5-B hardness test. If you ask, they may want to give you average hardness. Then ask about maximum hardness.

Your water will have been treated with chlorine or chloramine. However you are going to want to shock the inside to get started. One way will be to add some chlorine bleach to your filter housing. Then you can follow some of the techniques of well sanitizing. https://terrylove.com/forums/index....izing-extra-attention-to-4-inch-casing.65845/ is my well sanitizing writeup.

There is a good chance you will want a softener. Knowing the hardness and the number of people using the softened water regularly go into choosing an appropriate size. Your softener will use 10% crosslinked resin to slow the damage that the chlorine does.

 

[MaxBlack]

Reach4 your well sanitizing link was a little long for me this a.m., but I imagine you have ideas for the OP about "shock[ing] the inside."

It seems to me that it is almost a certainly that Trepidation's water pipes and fixtures throughout the house have grown all manner of gunk inside of them such that it might take quite a while really to flush them all clean. And I wonder how best to do that.

Chlorine of course needs Contact time in order to sanitize. So.... how to get enough chlorine into the system, then let it sit there long enough to do some good? We leave our Winter house in the summer for months at a time, and when we return the well water in the pipes clearly needs to be flushed-out again.

I have tried myself to add extra-strength Chlorox to an empty Big Blue housing, then run a faucet till I smell chlorine, but this is a huge PIA when I have fully seven inside faucets and three toilets. Certainly the BB housing can't hold enough chlorine and would have to be refilled many times.

As I type this I almost wonder if a better alternative might be (since we don't drink the water) to add tablets of Pool Shock (yes I know--not for drinking!) to the BB housing, and then run-and-stop-and-wait, and run-and-stop-and-wait, and ad nauseum until the house is flushed and the tablet(s) are gone (or what's left of them could be pulled-out again).

How would you do it Reach4?

 

[Reach4]

The new water would be chlorinated. But for a shock, I would first consider the water heater to be the tough one, because that has a large volume.

Personally, I would use a utility pump driving a garden hose, and a female-female hose adapter to feed water back into the water system. This could enter into a garden hose spigot, a laundry spigot, and even directly into the drain valve of the WH.

In https://terrylove.com/forums/index....edia-and-some-other-related-operations.99044/ I described using a utility pump to circulate treatment solution thru an iron+H2S filter.

I would also want to empty the treated water after contact to mostly somewhere other than the septic system. Septic systems can probably put up with a cup of bleach.

But, for a simpler system with no pump, I would use the cartridge filter to introduce bleach. I might try to introduce vinegar, but not directly with the bleach (you don't want to generate chlorine). I might first empty half of the WH water so the new chlorine coming in is not diluted so much.

Utility pumps can be useful for other things. Consider getting one or borrowing one from a friend. If the pump is not new, I would make the first job to sanitize the pump which could have been pumping who-knows-what. Overkill is called for I think. So the utility pump is going to make some things simpler, including routing the spent solution to a place where the chlorine killing stuff is not a problem.

Another possibility, if you can pull the anode, is to pour extra bleach into the anode hole. Pulling an old anode is not easy. I would expect this to be something you might do if you were changing out the anode anyway.

 

[MaxBlack]

Good ideas. I'm remembering too now having bought some chlorine tablets for my rainwater system. I'm imagining they might work well in the aforementioned Big Blue housing, which in my case normally has a 50micron filter in it. Maybe put instead a 2-1/2 inch filter in there and surround it with pellets.

In my case too I'd be discharging not into a septic system, but instead a city sewer line.

WELL PRO CHLORINE PELLETS .79 GRAM - 2.2 POUND BAG

Well Pro Chlorine Pellets are designed to sanitize the total water capacity of the well. Chlorination is a safe, convenient, and effective way to maintain clean water. The semi-soft and fast dissolving pellets are made up of approximately 70% Calcium Hypochlorite and are small enough to pass...

reverseosmosis.com

 

[Reach4]

Chlorine tablets for pools are normally slow dissolving. I don't see that as being desirable for this operation. So I would be thinking liquid chlorine bleach or in the pool chemical area, I would be looking for the shock treatment stuff if in the pool supply place.

But I see you were not referring to pool chlorine pellets, but rather well sanitizing pellets. Those are going go be fast, so they should be fine. However those are going to be a premium price if loading into the filter housing, I would presume.

 

[Zenon2cubed]

Max, if you're leaving the property vacant, leaving the shock dose in the lines would do a good job.