Discoloration and Cloudiness

Discoloration Or Cloudiness In Your Well Water

Iwant to talk to you about discoloration or cloudiness in the water and where it comes from, and exactly how you're gonna figure out what is causing the issue.

Three main things that can cause discoloration or cloudiness in your water:

Iron
Sedimentation
Tannins

How to test your water and identify the cause of discoloration:

Take a 5-gallon bucket, preferably a white bucket or clear bucket so you can see the color of the water better or the changes that are gonna be made as you go through the testing procedure on this.

Fill the bucket up to almost 90% with water from a faucet that is closest to your well (before it goes through any sort of filter system, that includes cartridge filters).

If the water is cloudy when you fill up that bucket or has discoloration to it, let the water sit for an hour and see if whatever is causing discoloration falls out of the solution and the water clears.

Iron

If it clears after an hour, that means that you have ferric iron or also known as red water iron. This is easy to treat with an iron filter system. (And possibly with a water softener coupled with the iron filter system.)

If the water does not clear by settling on its own after an hour, then you either have sediment or tannin in the water.

So what you're gonna do at that point is take a cup of household bleach. Dump it into that 5 gallons of water, stir it up with a stick. Let it sit for an hour.

If it's tannin, the bleach will actually burn the tannin out so the water will clear after an hour. If the water does not clear, it’s sediment.

Sediment

So at that point, we recommend that you use a couple of cartridge filters.

Start it off with a 20-micron filter first, a cleanable filter, and then a 5-micron filter. You can actually step it all the way down to half a micron if you need to. Run it through, see if that removes it for you.

At a 5 microns filter, if it does remove it, and you don't want to mess with changing filters out every month or two, then you can get a backwash instead of a filter.

That'll actually remove sediment down to 5 microns and send it to backwash every 4 days to just clean it out.

If not, the cartridge filters work fine for you, like I said, you can step it all the way down to half a micron BB.

Tannin

If it is tannin and the tannin burns out, the way you're gonna treat that is either with a:

Chlorination system

Use a chemical feed with a contact tank where the water feeds into the bottom and feeds out the top giving it the proper contact time to burn out the tannin, then run water though a carbon filter to remove the excess chlorine from the water.

Tannin Removal System

Is very similar to a water softener. It recharges with salt just like the softener does but it uses anion resin that's specifically made for tannin removal versus a cation resin that is specifically made for water softeners.