Sulfur in Water

Let’s talk about sulfur in your water. That stinky rotten egg odor that you get when you turn on your cold water faucet.

Some people get a little confused about where the sulfur is coming from and just say it’s annoying because of the odor.

Rotten egg.
Credit: thedailymeal.com

Yeah! I agree. It is annoying to take a shower, and then come out smelling worse than you did before you got in your shower.

If you have iron in your water, there is a possibility that it could be the anode rod of your hot water here that’s causing that sulfur odor.

So you wanna be careful and check your cold water and hot water separately.

Run your cold water, fill up a glass or some sort of larger container, and smell it right away.

See if you smell rotten egg odor in the water. If you don’t, then do your hot water, and do the same thing and smell in to see if you smell rotten egg odor.

If you don’t smell it in the cold at all but you do smell it in the hot, then the anode rod got deteriorated and fouled from the iron in your water.

Stinky Odor from Hot Water

So in that case, you either hire a plumber or replace the anode rod with a new anode rod to take care of that issue. Then put the proper treatment system in to treat your water to remove the iron from the water.

Deteriorated anode rod.
Credit: snellheatingandair.com

Corroded and new anode rod.
Credit: garynsmith.net

Stinky Odor from Cold Water

Now, if it’s the cold water that smells, then you have sulfur. Another thing you want to check is to make sure you don’t have a carbon filter on your water line on either the feed to your house or on the faucet that you’re taking your sample from to see if it smells or not.

If you have iron in your water and you’re using the standard carbon, like those cartridge carbon filters that you would pick up at your big box stores or some that plumbers use when they come out to your home to do the plumber repairs.

The thing of it is, because of the fact that those types of carbon cartridges or your standard carbon filters use what we call GAC, granulated activated carbon, or coconut-based carbon.

Granular activated carbon cartridge.

Coconut-based carbon.

Those types of carbons get fouled by iron, and when they get fouled by iron they throw off a rotten egg odor.

So you want to check to make sure that you don’t have a carbon filter inline like that. If you do, remove it, either bypass it if you have a way to bypass it or if you don’t and it’s a carbon cartridge, just simply turn off the water.

commercialfiltrationsupply.com

Credit: dengarden.com

Drain the pressure off of it. Unscrew and remove or bypass the carbon filter. Then run the water for a while and see if the odor goes away. Chances are it will.

Now, with all that said. If you truly do have sulfur in your water, then, you want to treat it, not just because of the fact that it just smells horrible but sulfur is actually highly corrosive to anything that is metal.

So it will have an effect and deteriorate the plumbing in your home over a period of time. There’s a very important reason to remove that sulfur not just for the annoying aspect but because of its corrosivity.

It’s not really great for you, to be taking it, especially when you’re in the shower or bath.

Corroded plumbing.
Credit: homeguides.sfgate.com

The way you treat sulfur is to either use a Catalytic Carbon Filter (on our website, a backwash catalytic carbon filter).

Catalytic carbon is man-made synthetic carbon. It will actually filter iron out without being fouled out by the iron.

It will also remove a fairly high amount of sulfur. In some cases, you might have a lot of iron in your water which would dictate that you need an iron filter and possibly even a water softener.

I always recommend that you couple a water softener with an iron filter because you’re just gonna get the best results that way.

The iron filter that you would use, the number one choice out there for sulfur and iron, is the Iron Master which uses AIO for air injection atomization to help trap and oxidize the contaminants such as iron, manganese, sulfur so they could be removed readily by the Katalox media.

Upflow-Catalytic-Carbon-Filter

Katalox-Light media.

The Katalox media has some of the strongest oxidizing abilities over any sort of other media out there today.

So even without the air injection, it has the ability to oxidize a lot of iron, manganese, and sulfur to remove it.

Air injection just elevates the performance of that system. Then follow that up with a water softener.