Well water was excellent - now sediment & air

[dougb]

We bought this house about 1.5 years ago, the owner just drank the water out of the tap, and it looked nice & clear. My diagonal neighbor just dug a well about 500-600 feet away from ours and on the day they hit clean water, ours got lots of sediment and disolved clay & The screens on faucets & the washing machine & the Britta faucet filter we installed (for drinking water) in the house got all clogged up that day. After a few days the water became clearer but still has a good amount of sediment in it.The neighbor told me that they hit muddy water at 140 ft. (the evidence was on the ground) and then hard rock at about

200 ft. At 270 feet they hit the cleaner water. he also told me the used a 4" hole until they hit hard rock & then went to a 3" hole & initially when they hit water at 270 feet that that water was also somewhat muddy, so the well driller said the seal between the 3" & 4" pipes was leaking & then he repaired it (how? I do not know). anyway, now we have this problem of sediment & some clay disolve in our water. After about 5 days I installed a sediment filter after the pump & Bladder tank and it does collect sediment, but you can see that are smaller particles getting through. The britta faucet filter now clogs up very fast, just a couple of days (not good at $15 each!). I talked to 1 well driller & he told me to drain the bladder tank several times and see if that clears up the sediment. I did it about 15 times, and there was a lot of clay/sediment initially an gradually decreased to just a little bit, but would not go completely away. Now we also have a bunch of air coming through the lines. What to do? There seem to be plenty of water still coming from the pump, the other day I ran 2 hoses continually outside for over an hour with no problems and lot of pressure. It has been about 3.5 weeks since this has started and the sediment is still coming. Any suggestions are welcome. Thank you.

[Frank]

Hopefully will settle down with time. I've seen this when neighbor just replaced his pump. Whole house sediment filter is a good idea anyway as we had minor sediment from well but it would gradually build, dirtying toilet tanks, etc. I'm down to a filter change every 6 months and toilets are cleaner. There are cheaper ways to filter water, like the pitcher filters and you can buy bottled in large containers. Water taste was off with neighbor incident and we had another bad taste occurence when our own pump needed changing. I believe there are triple type filters: rough sediment, fine sediment and carbon, but they cost more and may be over-kill.

Frank

[Michael Strickland]

Had similar problem after some blasting was done over a mile away - well is in rock all the way down. Luckily, I installed a whole house filter when I built the house for just such occasions.

I use the carbon filter which will help to eliminate off tastes - I use it for iron and it works quite well. It filters down to 5 microns which should help a lot with the faucet filter if you feel you still need it. I change mine every 3 months, as recommended, except for several changes within a shorter time after the blasting incident. Clogged one day after it was changed when the problem first occurred, next couple (may have been three, don't recall now) of changes were further apart each time and then went back to original routine - time between changes was determined by loss of water pressure.

Later, Mike (substitute strickland in the obvious location to reply directly)

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