I live in the country and have a deep well for my water source.\u00a0 The water is very acid, with a pH of about 5, and loaded with iron.\u00a0 So I have to treat my water to bring the pH up to an acceptable level to prevent my copper piping from eroding.<\/p>\n
But, I still had the problem of large amounts of iron in the water, which stained everything, and clogged up the water sediment filter (5 micron, 20 inch whole house sediment filter) every few days.\u00a0 The filter cartridges cost about $8 each, so I was spending $2 a day for filtering my well water.<\/p>\n
Shopping around for a solution, I came across BudgetWater.com and saw they had a selection of iron filters.\u00a0 After talking to one of their technicians, it was decided that the only solution which would work for me was a greensand iron filter because all the other technologies required a pH of the water above 7.\u00a0 So I ordered a large greensand system, with a 12″ diameter tank, and a Logix 268 valve\/controller system.<\/p>\n
The system came with 2 cubic feet of greensand which was put into the tank, and the system plumbed into my house.\u00a0 The chemical tank was filled with potassium permanganate which is used to regenerate the filter.\u00a0 Basically, the system is like a water softener, except there is greensand in the filter, and the chemical tank holds potassium permanganate (Pot Perm) instead of salt.<\/p>\n
The system worked for almost a year, until one morning when we were taking our baths, the water came out of the faucet pink in color.\u00a0 Potassium permanganate colors the water pink.\u00a0 So I went into the basement, and found that when the unit recycled in the night, it had pumped the sand from inside the tank into the drain, which plugged it up, and kept the filter from backwashing.<\/p>\n
This was a new one on me, so I called up the BudgetWater techs, who had never heard of this problem before.\u00a0 They were totally unhelpful, so I had to figure out how to fix this problem.\u00a0\u00a0 Two of their suggestions were: a broken pipe inside the tank, or using water from a faucet in the middle of the night.\u00a0 A broken pipe was unlikely, but I had to check that.\u00a0 Using water would not cause sand to go down the drain; if anything, it would have pulled sand into the house plumbing which would have filled up and clogged the sediment filter.\u00a0 Because of the valves inside the controller, the only thing using water while the system regenerated would cause is unfiltered water to go into the house plumbing.<\/p>\n
The bottom line is that the technical support at BudgetWater.com was not much help.<\/p>\n
First, I bypassed the system, so was back to $2 a day for sediment filter cartridges.<\/p>\n
Next, I was faced with the problem of removing the remaining wet sand and water from the filter tank.\u00a0 BudgetWater suggested using my shop vac.\u00a0 This did not work well at all, and made quite a mess.\u00a0 Finally though I did get enough of the sand out of the tank to see that there was no broken pipes inside.<\/p>\n
After that, I had to figure out how to get about a cubic foot of sand out of the drain pipe that was buried in the basement concrete floor.\u00a0 This took me 3 days to get the drain open again.\u00a0 I was not happy at all.<\/p>\n
I certainly didn’t want to pay over $700 a year for sediment filters, so I really needed to get the greensand filter working again.\u00a0 Taking stock of what I had or didn’t have, showed me that I would have to buy new greensand, and since I couldn’t be absolutely certain that the tank was ok, I should replace the tank.<\/p>\n
Greensand is expensive.\u00a0 BudgetWater’s price was $96 per 1\/2 cubic foot, so it would be almost $400 to buy from them.\u00a0 A local supplier had it for 1\/2 the price, so I bought it from a local source.\u00a0 The tank was not available locally, so I bought a new one from BudgeWater.\u00a0 They gave me a small discount, and it cost me almost $200 for a new tank.<\/p>\n
Continued in part 2.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I live in the country and have a deep well for my water source.\u00a0 The water is very acid, with a pH of about 5, and loaded with iron.\u00a0 So I have to treat my water to bring the pH …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-product-review","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wgpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wgpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wgpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wgpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wgpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1264"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.wgpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1264\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1271,"href":"https:\/\/www.wgpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1264\/revisions\/1271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wgpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wgpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wgpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}