The House Project: Water Test Results

I was wondering what happened to the water test results, so I called up Alchem today. Somehow, they decided to mail the results to the testing address (where there is no mail box yet), not to my current house, so I had to run down a pick them up at their office.

I had been assuming from the taste of the water that it was hard, and I solicited advice from my readers based on this. (And what a surprise--one of my readers works in the water quality division of Los Angeles Department of Water & Power.) Thanks to all!

It turns out that the hardness results are 0.22 grains per gallon: "Water is soft" according to the report. I think what I was tasting was the iron (0.10 mg/liter) and the lead (0.100 mg/liter). The iron is distasteful, but the lead is apparently about eight times the "EPA action level for lead in drinking water," so while I won't need a water softener, I will need a whole house filter that takes out lead and iron.

The iron is getting oxygenated enough in the water tank to convert from ferrous to ferric oxidation state, so almost anything that filters out small particulates ought to solve that problem. The lead, however, is probably going to require some other solution. I will start investigating how to handle this, but in the meantime, if you have specific experience with how to get the lead out, let me know.

UPDATE: I just spoke to someone at Whirlpool. They make a whole house filtration system which consists of a housing into which you can put a number of different replaceable filters. This is actually a clever idea; you just line them up in series to perform whatever filtering you need.

Anyway, this customer support person was very East Coast in tone and attitude, but in spite of that, very helpful. She explained that no one has a whole house lead filtration system because historically, lead in water is usually from the house pipes, and there's no point in filtering the lead out before you get the kitchen faucet. She also indicated that it is quite unusual to find lead in recent plumbing or in well water, and suggested that I might want to flush the water out of our current tank, and have it retested for lead. This actually makes a lot of sense. This evening I'll drain the water tank, let it refill, and arrange for another test. I will also be curious to see if it changes the situation with respect to iron.

Last house project entry.