Pump/water issues

[hube2]

We have a lot of iron in our water. A 5 micron filter before the water softener solves that problem fairly well for us. They do make whole house iron filters that back flush like a softner. We had one in our old house, but it really cut down on the pressure something fierce. We could not flush the toilet and take a shower at the same time.

Thankfully we live in the midwest where you drill down 100 feet and hit plenty of water.

I have a whole house filter system that used to cut my pressure significantly. The solution was to use multiple filters in parallel (reverse return). Water is like electricity. Current over each branch is equal reducing the resistance to water flow over the entire circuit. 1/(1/r1+1/r2+1/r3).... with equal size filters you just divide by the number of filters, so with 3 filters the resistance to flow over is 1/3 what it was with 1 filter. I use 20 micron filters, If I had to use 5 micron filters I would have put in more than 3.

 

[Alien]

The foot valve went in our pump recently. It was taking about a minute + to start pumping water. The pump was only 8 years old and was smaller than what we wanted so we decided to pull it up and put a larger pump in instead of fixing it.
There were signs of a lot of iron so the guy dumped a whole 20 gallon drum of cleaner in the bore. Mistake. He put too much too quickly so when the pump started it airated immediately and shut down. It took several starts and pumping out to bring it right and about 3 weeks before the water started to really clean up. I was a bit cranky with him. We pump from the bore well to a house tank and use a pressure pump from there to the house so our tank was full of yellow tinged water and we had to buy water for those weeks.
Anyway it has settled down now and the end result is we have a good pump and plenty of water and hopefully no iron problems.
A 5 micron filter wouldn't last long here. We use a minimum of 10 and a taste filter after that.

 

[ponytug]

We have a large sediment filter (sand), 20gpm 14"x 54" tank, that filters everything coming out of the well. Apparently the media (sand/garnet/zeolite) is supposed to be changed every five years. I never knew. Certainly beats changing the usual 9" cartridges, which we have to prefilter water into our RO unit. The filter water then has a secondary settling time in twin 5000 gallon tanks, before being used.

It is looking like we will pull the pump to replace the leaking foot valve and replace the pump while it is out, and at the same time replace the media in the sediment filter and service the Fleck 1500 valve on the filter.

We are considering using zeolite (Filter-AG plus / clinoptilolite) instead of sand for better filtering. Anyone use it?

More when I have more details...

All the best,

Peter