Can I please get advice on how to solve my well water issues?

November 15, 2021 7:44 AM

We need to decide what to do to fix our well water issues and I would really like some advice from someone who is not trying to sell me a water treatment system.

We bought a house, it has well water. It has a funky smell. The water is hard (20 grains) and has coliform bacteria in it.

Currently the water comes into a house and goes through a water softener, then a whole house filter, then a tubular filter, then a UV system to kill the bacteria. The water softener and whole house filter are both old and probably past their life. The softener is getting the hardness down to 2 or 3 grains. The whole house filter seems to still be working.

One company suggested buying a high end water softener and replacing the whole house filter with a carbon filter system. The softener seems fine to me, like $2500 and then $8 bags of salt every month and it lasts 20 years. Great. But the whole house water filter it was like it would cost $1600, require $430 to replace the carbon every 3-5 years and the whole system only lasts 10 years. I really don’t want to do this if I don’t have to.

So I called another company and they suggested replacing the tubular sediment filter with a carbon filter to see what happened. It did stop the smell and we didn’t get any sediment through or loss of flow. Yay. But then the company said wait and see how long that lasts. It didn’t last a month before the smell came back.

So now what to do. The carbon filter is only $5 but I really don’t want to replace it every 3 weeks. The maintenance of the whole house carbon system doesn’t seem bad ($430 over 5 years is $7 per month) but that’s a really expensive system to replace every 10 years.

Are there other options? Have someone install a bigger carbon filter so I only have to change it every 3 months? Add another tubular filter for sediment in case that was clogging the carbon filter too fast?

Just hoping to get some advice and frames of reference before I call these companies back. I won’t threadsit but I’m happy to answer questions. Thank you in advance.

posted by cali59 to Home & Garden (7 answers total)

So we have a sediment filter and when we moved it the previous homeowner had a carbon filter in it, which had clogged to the point that our water pressure was half what it should be. When we got it sorted, the well guy told us that if we needed a carbon filter, it needed to be separate and down the line from the sediment filter, or else the bigger particles would just choke it dead. So I think that latter company's stopgap is probably not worth it long-term - you'd probably need two separate stages for that to be effective.
posted by restless_nomad at 7:54 AM on November 15, 2021

Rhetorical Q: Where is the coliform coming from? Is it possible there is cross-contamination from someone's septic system? Dealing with that will spare you a lot of downstream treatment. Family I know only got coliform in the well after the nearby city spread out around them in the 1970s with bungalow bliss: all dependent on septic tanks and drain-fields. You can't do much about that but cracks in your own pipe-work might be remediable. The smell is presumably some sort of microbial action. Is anyone suggesting bombing the hole with Calcium hypochlorite and / or cleaning out the sludge at the bottom [à la WHO]
posted by BobTheScientist at 8:34 AM on November 15, 2021

Response by poster: Not to threadsit but to answer Bob’s question:

We live in a neighborhood with about 60 houses, each with their own well and septic. I believe there’s code that no septic can be within 100ft of a well. I don’t think there’s any major industry contamination nearby.

I did call the company which installed the UV filter and asked if they did a chlorination of the well as recommended in the UV manual be done at installation. They said no because in their experience that can maybe solve that problem but cause other problems and to just trust the UV to make the water safe to drink.

And while I’m here, we haven’t had any issue with water flow so I don’t think the carbon filter got clogged with sediment. But there probably should be one before the water softener anyway so I’m not opposed to having one installed and seeing if it helps.
posted by cali59 at 8:59 AM on November 15, 2021

If you are US based, your local county extension agent might have some advice.
posted by oceano at 10:09 AM on November 15, 2021 [2 favorites]

I have no experience with a UV system, the standard around here is typically chlorination, but one of the first things people look into if there is a sulfur smell coming from their water is to shock the well with chlorine.

The UV may kill the bacteria after it passes through the whole system but it is unlikely to do much about the compounds the bacteria already produced which are the cause of the smell. While a carbon filter after the sediment filter will remove these, shocking the well addresses the issue at the source and is usually a once every few years intervention as opposed to continually replacing carbon filters.

I'm surprised they didn't do that already when the well was new, I always thought it was pretty standard practice. Maybe there's something particular about your well water that makes it problematic?
posted by selenized at 11:24 AM on November 15, 2021

I think you should call your local Health Department for advice, not the internet. I don't mean this glibly - just that there are many technical and legal considerations that are specific to location, and they should have environmental health officers on staff to answer such questions.

For example, my quick search for NJ (if you are still there) shows that disinfection is highly recommended for private wells with microbial contamination. Your Health Dept. will know best here, and may also be able to advise on risks from nearby septic, and to steer you in the right direction with your small water system.
posted by Paper rabies at 1:21 PM on November 15, 2021 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Again not to threadsi, but to follow up on the last two posts. The house is about 60 years old so this isn’t a new well. The sellers needed to have the well water tested to sell the house. They found the bacteria and went ahead and had a UV system installed. The township department of health signed off on it.

We bought the house without seeing a copy of the well report, just the township document saying it was safe. We noticed the smell during final walkthrough but our realtor suggested that since the well was declared safe, the smell was probably because it had been sitting empty for two weeks. We did later see a Facebook post from the sellers from a few years ago complaining about smell but we just can’t believe they just lived with it for that long. I tried reaching out to them but they were unresponsive.

I will try calling the township health department again tomorrow and discuss chlorinating the well and why it wasn’t required since yes NJ seems to be recommending it immediately. Thank you for that link. I’ll also try finding county or state officials.
posted by cali59 at 4:15 PM on November 15, 2021