Hard iron well water, have filter, softener options

[evilhomer]

Just moved into a new house in Michigan on well water. It's on a whole house filter and softener. Without giving any thought to this I brewed my first batch here the other day. The mash went fine but the airlock activity has dropped off a little quicker then I'm used to, but the basement holds 63 degrees here which is a little cooler then I'm used to.

I picked up a water test kit from lowes to check the water for the family. You could do each test twice so I did one pre filter/softener and one from the kitchen sink.

There is always the possibility that I messed some of the tests up matching the colors was a little difficult at times. But here's what I came up with.

non filtered/softened - Total Alkalinity 180ppm, pH around 8, hardness was off the chart. 425 ppm was blue on their chart, the dipstick was purple. Iron was 4 ppm which explains the rust stains in the tub and why the whole house filter turns red so fast.

filtered/softened - Total Alkalinity 200ppm, is this supposed to be higher or is that an error? pH around 8, hardness 30-50 ppm and Iron was 0.

Aside from buying water, what would be the best route for me to brew with? Keep using the sink water, maybe bypass the softener on brew day and just use the whole house filter? Or use it straight from the well on a non filtered spigot.

 

[ajdelange]

Your situation is a little complex because of the iron. If you got rid of the iron by some other means (greensand filter...) you could perhaps deal with the hardness using some of the common techniques (boiling, lime treatment) for that and come up with a decent brewing water. Softening is not good for brewing water because it removes calcium (of which you often want a minimal 50 mg/L) and replaces it with sodium without having any effect on the alkalinity which is usually the big problem in brewing.

As you noted the Lowe's kit testing is pretty iffy. A properly working softener should have removed hardness down to 1 or 2 ppm at most, the alkalinity should not change and I'm a bit surprised it got all the iron given that it didn't get all the calcium. What I'm hinting at is that you ought to send pre and post softener samples off to Ward Labs or another testing service to get a better idea as to what you are actually dealing with.

The conceptually simplest approach for you is probably a softener followed by an RO unit. The softener swaps calcium for sodium so that the calcium doesn't precipitate on the RO membrane and then the RO membrane gets out the sodium, bicarbonate, and other stuff with the result being much lower in mineral content than the input water. There is some expense associated with an RO unit but not much and you must add salts to the water to make up a portion of the minerals lost but the alternatives are much more complicated (decarbonation by heat or chemically followed by mineral supplementation).

 

[mabrungard]

Ion exchange softening does pick up all divalent ions like Ca, Mg, and Fe. Its appropriate that the iron was dropped to zero, but it looks like the softener is undersized to handle all the calcium. Of course, the bad thing is that the softened water is picking up all that sodium.

As AJ says, a RO unit installed downstream of the softener will give you best performance. I suggest you consider the largest RO tank you can afford to store the treated water. Plumb the RO to your icemaker and to the kitchen sink so that your family can avoid drinking high sodium water. Plumbing the RO to your brewing area would be a great addition too. I've already done all these things in my house.

 

[ajdelange]

... it looks like the softener is undersized to handle all the calcium.

Or hadn't been regenerated recently.

Plumb the RO to your icemaker and to the kitchen sink so that your family can avoid drinking high sodium water. Plumbing the RO to your brewing area would be a great addition too. I've already done all these things in my house.

If you do that (and it certainly is handy) remember that softened and decarbonated water is quite corrosive and don't use metal pipe (unless it is all easily accessible). I note with interest that plastic pipe (more like tubing than pipe really) seems to be the standard for indoor plumbing in Canada (or Quebec at least) as that's what's stocked in all the home improvement stores (though they have the copper too).

Edit: Just went through new construction here in Virginia. All the potable water is run through plastic pipe (though the hydronic heating cricuits are copper) so I guess the codes have changed here as well.

 

[evilhomer]

I'm wondering if the water wasn't softened to 0 because of a setting in the softener. I was looking through the manual and it has a setting for your hardness level + iron level. Based on their little formula in there it should have been set at 50 but it was set at 40. This is a number on the digital unit, not exactly sure what it adjusts.

 

[ajdelange]

It basically sets a counter. There is a little turbine in the inlet which measures the amount of water entering the unit. You tell the microprocessor how hard the water is and from that it calculates how much water it can treat before it needs to be regenerated. The microprocessor counts turns of the turbine until that much (or a bit less) water has passed through and then schedules regeneration for the following morning (e.g. at 2 AM). If the water is a lot harder than what you dial in the resin can become exhausted before regeneration takes place. That may be what happened here. Or the test could be of such low precision that it read 50 when the actual hardness is much lower.