Sediment, Continued

As I noted a while back, the water from my well has sediment.  A lot of sediment.  The filter I was using previously, a one-micron wound string unit, worked pretty well, but some clay got through.  My filters are mostly nominal one micron, not absolute: the difference is explained here, in a document by the University of Nebraska Extension Service.  Essentially, with a nominal filter, some particles larger than one micron will get through--the standard indicated in the publication is 85% of particles with the size of the filter rating.  That being said, clay particles can be smaller than one micron: the Nebraska piece indicates they they can be as small as 0.2 microns.

I do have an 0.5 micron absolute filter cartridge that I may try sometime.  For now, I'm getting good results with nominal 1.0 micron filters.

The water is pretty good, without readily visible sediment, as I noted before.  Dishes and white clothes look okay to me, although with time they may look sandblasted (in the case of the dishes) or red-tinted (for the clothes).

That being said, as with the toilet tank, evidence of what's getting through can be found.  The picture shows what happened when I wiped out the detergent dispensing tray from my washing machine.  Even though the water flow rate is pretty high, unmistakable evidence of clay can be found.  A reverse osmosis filter could remove even more, but that would require a much larger filtration setup--multi-stage--that might impact throughput too much...for negligible gain.