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Intro to Our Water Problems

Our water softener was hurting. It still worked, kind of. It was going through salt like normal, but the water was tasting worse and worse. Salty-ish, in fact.

My wife refused to drink the water, so we were going through dozens of cases of bottled water from Costco. It finally got to me too. When you have to spit out any water that gets in your mouth during your shower, you know something’s not right. So I talked to some people, and got referred to my local hardware store.

I filled up an empty water bottle (we had lots of those available) with our hose water (from before the softener) and took it to the store. The manager guy took it in the back to test it. It took him quite a while.

When he finally came back, he told me that he tested it twice because the numbers were off the chart and he didn’t believe the first test.

Fixing Our Water

For those who are interested: our water has an iron content of 3.5 and a hardness level of 67. I forget the units on those numbers, but I think the hardness involved grains.

The store manager said they had an iron filter that would help, but he wanted the water treatment specialist (and installer) guy to look at our system in person so he could make sure nothing else was wrong. Maybe he thought we connected the water softener backwards or something.

The water treatment guy came out and tested our water. He hadn’t believed the store manager’s results either. Sure enough, he got the same result. Our well was fine and the rest of our system was fine. It’s just the groundwater in our area is very hard. Based on his assessment, we got an iron filter from the store and he installed it.

It cost around $700, but it was well worth it.

Get it? Well worth it…

Ahem.
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