Filtering Water

So my well has some issues.  It's an old bored well, i.e., wide and shallow.  As I've noted previously, there's often sediment in the water (actually, there's always sediment, but sometimes it's a noticeable problem despite nominal one-micron filtration).  The refurbishing done on the well last year was intended to mitigate the periodic sedimentation problem, but it has become apparent that when there's heavy rain in a short period of time, that can cause water to enter the well bore from the bottom fast enough that it stirs up sediment.  My location got about 24 inches of rain in the first 2 months of 2020, including 6 inches on one day.  So I've gotten a couple of bouts of stirred sediment.  The picture of the dog bowl shows what it was like when I wiped it out during a particularly cloudy time.

Another issue is bacterial contamination, also as previously commented upon.  Although guidelines say that filtering water through a certain depth of soil (this source suggests 10 feet), in actual practice it seems that they are still susceptible to contamination even if deeper.  I had an inspection of the casing done, and it looked pretty good all the way down to the 40+ foot bottom.  Nonetheless, I have had recurring bacterial contamination issues, and chlorine shocking is a major pain.

Ultimately, I'll probably drill a well, that is less likely to have issues.  In the meantime, I have set up my Berkey.  I got a Royal Berkey a few years ago, but had never used it.  I was not sure it would really work.  One can find all kinds of claims and counterclaims about the black Berkey filter elements.  Berkey itself says they have silver in them, which is helpful, and various lab tests are available (others question those).  So I set it up, primed the filters (a challenging task when the source water is known to be contaminated), and then ran a test. 

The filters worked: no bacteria.  However, when dumping turbid water into the top, it does clog up the filters fairly quickly--very quickly, actually, depending on the degree of turbidity.  If you have visions of using pond water in a Berkey and drinking what comes out, that might work out okay in terms of purity, but get used to dismantling and scrubbing the system frequently.

The filter element at the top has been cleaned, and the bottom hasn't (yet).  I didn't use the paper towel to clean; I used a scrubber sponge.  A lot of silt is still visible at the very bottom of the filter; I'm not cleaning there because I don't want to detach the element from its base.  That would basically ruin the filter.  This degree of fouling happened within just a few gallons when the water was bad.


Otherwise, the filters work okay, although don't take the throughput claims of Berkey too seriously.  Even when primed, they won't filter anywhere near as fast as suggested, unless the top reservoir is kept topped off.

This picture shows what the top tank looks like almost 24 hours after filling: it has processed most of the water, but not all.  I don't fill the top reservoir to the absolute top, and am getting about 1.5 gallons per day through the system with one refill per day.  It's faster when the elements are first cleaned, then eventually slows to where not much gets through the elements at all (maybe a half gallon per day or less), at which time they need to be cleaned again.  There's room for two additional filters, which would speed things up, but the same cleaning issues would remain.

So it does work, but it's not exactly the most convenient way to get water when compared to just turning the tap.  My well does have contamination issues, but most coliforms aren't really harmful, and I'm not having any GI issues when showering in what my well offers up.  Nonetheless, a more permanent solution is forthcoming.

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.

Well Water

Well, well, well...  I have a bored well that is about 45 feet deep, with (I think) about 15 feet of water at the bottom.  That nets out to around 270 gallons.  The soil is in many places clay-like, and I have noticed some sediment in the water before.

I'm just returning the well to service, and this is what happened when I turned the water on:

This is a problem (especially so given that it's after filtration with a nominal 5-micron filter).  Outside, filling a stock tank looked like this:

My initial assumption was that the submersible pump was too close to the bottom.  So I had a well man out to look at it, and drew him a bucket of water to demonstrate.  It wasn't cloudy.  There was some sediment, but it was mostly clear.

Before this, I'd gotten a couple of water tests done.  It passed on minerals, failed on bacteria.  No E. coli, but plenty of other coliform bacteria.  The test results noted that could be caused by a number of factors, including surface water contamination.

That's exactly what the problem is.  The well guy diagnosed it fairly easily, but the symptoms were telling: cloudy after rain, fine when it's not raining.  The good news is there's a fix.  The bad news is that it'll be fairly messy to do.  Alas.  It involves digging around the concrete liner to about five feet, sealing, and backfilling with bentonite.  Part of this all will involve demolishing the well house and moving all of the plumbing underground--which will eliminate the danger of freezing pipes.

Hopefully after it all I'll be back to normal well sediment issues, which are not insignificant but nothing like what you see above.  I might need a better filter than one that's nominally rated at 5 microns (nominal = average, more or less, meaning some pores are larger than 5 microns).  This publication from the University of Nebraska indicates that clay particles can be 0.2-2.0 microns.

My filter is a pretty basic 10x2.5 single cartridge model (shown here gloriously silted up).  Culligan's best filter is a nominal 1 micron, but there are other 10x2.5 filters out there that claim to be absolute 1 micron (absolute means the filter should stop over 99% of particles over 1 micron versus maybe 85% for nominal filters).  Finer filters are more prone to clogging, perhaps...but I have an abosolute 1 micron filter cartridge to try.  If necessary, there are further steps that can be taken. There are multistage filters that can go all the way down to an absolute 0.2 microns if necessary (albeit possibly with a hit to water pressure that's already not very high...).  I'll see how things look after the well is refurbished.