In this early summer Occasional you'll read about the differing treatment needs for city water and private wells, some versatile and very practical cartridge-style whole house filters, learn how leaves threaten water quality, hear about large-sized aeration and filtration systems, learn how to get RO water to your refrigerator, read about a London doctor's fight against waterborne disease, the very high cost of shutting down oil wells (and who is likely to be stuck with paying for it), hear dire predictions of rising sea levels in the very near future, the Mexican war against avocado growers, water inequality on the Colorado River, and, as always, there is much, much more.
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your
water comes to you in pipes from a municipal water supplier that gets
water from lakes and rivers and sometimes wells, treats it a bit to make
it clear, odor-free, germ-free, non-corrosive, and generally palatable,
then pumps it through a maze of pipes to your home.
As
part of its treatment, the city water plant adds chlorine or a mixture
of chlorine and ammonia called chloramine to the water to
kill pathogens. The treatment plant also adds other chemicals to clarify
the water and prevent corrosion in pipes. Some cities also add a product called fluoride which is believed to prevent
tooth decay.
Between
the city water plant and the home lie miles of pipe, some of it
very old, made of a variety of materials and in varying states of
repair. The quality of the water is affected a lot by pipe materials and by
contaminants that can enter the water if the pipe leaks or is broken.
The water that leaves the treatment plant is not the same water that
enters the home. A lot of things happen to it along the way.
Most
city water plants do a praiseworthy job of taking some pretty dirty raw
water from a lake or river, getting the mud and sticks out of it and
turning it into water that looks clear, tastes good, and won’t cause a
cholera epidemic. They supply water
that is of really high quality for hosing down driveways and flushing
toilets. People who have watched a plumber cut open a pipe entering
their home, however, usually don’t feel good about drinking their tap
water anymore, or even bathing in it.
This
very decent water delivered by the city can be made excellent in the
home, which is, after all, where the fine polishing of water should take
place. Home treatment makes much more sense than trying to supply top
quality drinking water for flushing toilets and mopping floors.
Point of entry treatment for
city water most often consists of cartridge or tank-style
activated carbon filters to remove disinfectants (chlorine or
chloramine). If the water is “hard” (meaning that it has lots of
calcium and magnesium in it), it can be treated with a conventional
water softener or one of the several newer “salt-free” alternatives.
Treatment for hardness is mainly done to protect pipes and fixtures and
to make water more aesthetically pleasing. Adding a point-of-entry
ultraviolet (UV) unit to assure bacteria-free, cyst-free water for the
whole home is becoming more popular, especially in light of the
increasing number of “boil water” alerts.
For point-of-use treatment for
the water that you’re going to drink, cook with, or make ice with, a
variety of countertop and under-the-sink systems are available, from
simple, very tight carbon filters that improve taste and odor and remove
chemicals to the more comprehensive treatment, reverse osmosis. The
real king of point-of-use drinking water systems is reverse osmosis. A
good undersink reverse osmosis unit can provide top quality drinking
water for a moderate cost. RO, as it is called, removes virtually
anything one would want removed from water, including the more difficult
contaminants like arsenic, lead, chromium 6, fluoride, chloramines,
trihalomethanes, and a wide range of pesticides, herbicides,
“pharmaceuticals,” and so-called “emerging contaminants." RO also removes the PFAS group of "forever chemicals" that are now so much in the news.
Typical treatments for city water:
Point of entry: Whole house carbon filtration and (if needed) water a softener or a TAC softener substitute for hardness. Ultraviolet (optional) for bacteria.
If you live outside the city . . .
your
water usually comes to you from a well on your own property. A well is
essentially a hole in the ground with a pipe through which water is sucked up to the surface from an underground pool. It's like drinking from a
glass with a drinking straw. Also, many non-city dwellers pull their
water through pipes directly from a pond or stream and treat it
themselves.
If
you have a well or draw water from a lake or river, you are your own
water treatment superintendent, so you need to pay attention to what
you're about. The first thing you should do is get a good, comprehensive
water test. This will cost you a couple of hundred dollars, but it will
pay for itself easily in what you'll save by not purchasing unnecessary
or inappropriate equipment. If the test shows that your water is
perfect, the peace of mind you gain will pay for the test.
The
reason the well test is needed is that you don't have the benefit of
the testing that's done for your with city water. If there's arsenic in
the city's water source, the city is obligated to take care of it and to
tell you about it. If there's arsenic in your well, the only way you'll
know is by having a good test done.
With
private water sources there is a much greater chance that extreme
treatment will be needed. Here are some of the common issues with well,
river and pond water, along with some of the ways they can be corrected.
Bacteria - pathogens like E. coli can be controlled by chlorination or ultraviolet treatment.
Iron and manganese - treated with iron filters that often require pre-treatment with aeration, hydrogen peroxide or chlorine. Iron and manganese can also treated with a water softener.
Hydrogen Sulfide (rotten egg odor) - treated by chlorination or aeration followed by filtration.
Arsenic, Chromium, Nitrates - reverse osmosis for drinking water. (Frequently left untreated for point of entry.)
Pesticide, Herbicide, general chemical contamination - Carbon filtration.
Hardess- treated with an ion exchange water softener.
Tannins (tea colored water) - Ion exchange and carbon filtration.
Sand, Sediment - Backwashing or cartridge style sediment filters.
Compact Whole House Filters for a Variety of Purposes
By far the most common application for cartridge-style whole house filtration units is removal of sediment from city and well water and the removal of chlorine or chloramine from treated city water. However, these very versatile filters can fulfill a number of functions according to the cartridge installed.
The compact whole house units use basic standard sized and readily available 4.5″ X 20″ filter cartridges. The housings are the old faithful 20″ Pentek “Big Blue” units, so replacement o rings and wrenches are easy to find. Brackets are sturdy but light stainless steel, and mounting screws are included. Standard size is for 1″ pipe, but you can have 3/4″ or 1.5″ for the asking. Two or more units can be joined together with standard hardware store pipe nipples or stainless connectors to make multi-stage filters.
The standard units offered on our website are a 5 micron wound string sediment ($159) and a utility grade CTO coconut shell carbon block filter, a taste/odor/chlorine filter for city water with chlorine. This unit is often also used to polish taste and odor on well water. ($189.)
One each of the filters above to be installed in series is a popular combination and costs $329, shipping included.
In addition to the two standard units, the same housing assembly can be used for other filtration tasks. It becomes a very high performance chemical filter for a variety of contaminants when used with the MatriKX CTO Plus. The CTO Plus version is rated for an incredible 240,000 gallons of chlorine reduction, 12,000 gallons of chloramine treatment, plus reduction of smaller amounts of PFAS and VOC. Unit price of the unit with the CTO Plus is $210.
It can also be equipped with Pentek’s Radial Flow Chloramine filter. This very very free-flowing chloramine cartridge is rated for 25,000 gallons chloramine reduction at 2.5 gpm and 200,000 gallons of chlorine reduction at 4 gpm. Full price is $303.
With Pentek’s 4.5″ X 20″ iron reduction cartridge, the compact whole house unit becomes an exceptionally useful light duty iron filter for well water. Cost of the compact iron unit is $250.
Other options include pleated, wound string, and melt blown sediment cartridges in many micron ratings, a variety of carbon blocks, plus media cartridges with catalytic carbon, KDF, softener resin, calcite, and more. Any cartridge on this page will fit the unit, and you can make an approximate price for the full unit by adding $120 to the cartridge price.
Serious water issues from cyanobacterial blooms to dead spots in the ocean are regularly blamed on excessive nutrients, specifically nitrogen and phosphorous, that humans put into the water. These result mainly from fertilizers, animal manure (both from feedlots and companion animals), and overflows from sewage treatment plants.
But now comes a report by the U.S. Geological Survey telling us that failure to remove leaves from areas where they can be swept into stormwater collection systems can spike stormwater with phosphorus and nitrogen and greatly compromise water quality. In fact, leaf removal studies performed in Madison, WI, seemed to show that, at least during the time of year when leaves are most abundant, “. . .timely leaf removal reduced total phosphorous loads by 84 percent and nitrogen loads by 74 percent.” The conclusion was that phosphorous in wastewater could be greatly reduced if the city would collect leaves and clean streets weekly and before “rain events” between early September and mid-November.
Clearly, the Madison experiment is about big-time leaf harvesting by city crews, not about requiring individual tree owners to clean up after their trees the way that pet owners are now supposed to pick up after their dogs. At least, as a confirmed non-raker, that’s what I hope it means.
The issue seems to be that, as one writer puts it, “. . .when water managers have run out of other levers to pull, [leaf removal] is an effort that should be prioritized.” I would put it more bluntly: Since we can’t get profit-driven corporate farmers to adopt saner and more earth-friendly growing methods, and we can’t expect people to cut back on the meat and dairy diet that is burying us in animal feces, and we can’t ask people to give up their pets, and since we certainly can’t ask people to pay a bit more for water or to agree to increase their taxes so that our ancient sewage treatment plants can be upgraded, we should concentrate our efforts on picking up leaves.
While we have to applaud any effort to keep water clean, leaf management seems like a pretty tricky business. For example, if leaf collecting becomes a national nutrient reduction strategy, what are we going to do with all the leaves we collect? Landfills are already bulging. Are we going to inject them into deep wells, like fracking waste, or haul them to leaf disposal sites in the desert? Will we eventually try to genetically engineer leafless trees, or trees whose leaves are permanently attached?
Keeping the streets clean is an essential part of wastewater management. It is certainly better to sweep up contaminants before they get into the water than to remove them from the water later. But on the broader leaf issue, I’m still a non-raker. As Iris DeMent says in her great anthem to personal freedom, leaves should be left to “get to where they’re going without the help of you and me.”
Standard residential AerMax units for treatment of iron, manganese, and hydrogen sulfide in well water have been one of our most successful products over the years. Standard units shown on our website are for service flows of ten gallons per minute or so, but we have high flow AerMax units if you need something larger. See Small Commercial Aeration for Iron and Hydrogen Sulfide Treatment.
Bigger Backwashing Filters
Our website offers only Fleck 5600 residential-sized filters. The 5600 filters meet most residential needs. If you need a larger filter, we have them with other filter control valves, like the Fleck 2815. We also have Nelsen C-Series units that go all the way up to 21" X 72" backwashing filters. These fully automatic units feature digital controls for up to 1.5" pipe. Fleck large sized filters and the Nelsen C-Series are "call for information" and "call to purchase" items that aren't on our website. These can be purchased as filter only, without media, or as complete filters with such media as standard and catalytic carbon, Katalox, Zeolite, Birm, and Filox.
A report has found that thousands of oil and gas wells across
Colorado cannot generate enough revenue to cover their own cleanup cost.
More than half the state’s oil and gas wells will generate, at most,
$1bn in revenue and it will cost $4bn to $5bn to decommission those
sites responsibly. Without quick action by state officials, Colorado
taxpayers may be on the hook to foot the remaining $3bn.
Massive water main breaks in Atlanta this month forced a boil water advisory and citywide shutdown.
Large parts of South Carolina could be submerged by water as sea
levels rise because of climate change. The United Nations’
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projects that by the
year 2100, global sea levels could rise by up to 3.6 feet if greenhouse
gas emissions are not mitigated. It added that a rise of about 6.6 feet
“cannot be ruled out.”
Norfolk Southern Corp. recently announced it will pay more than $300
million to resolve investigations by three US agencies in the aftermath
of a catastrophic train derailment last year that contaminated the town
of East Palestine, Ohio with toxic chemicals. $40 million of the total
will go to long-term monitoring of water contamination.
The world’s oceans – already being pushed into an extreme new state
because of the climate crisis – are now facing a “triple threat” of
extreme heating, oxygen loss and acidification, according to research.
These three threats have been spurred by the burning of fossil fuels and
deforestation, the study found, with about a fifth of the world’s ocean
surface being particularly vulnerable to the three threats hitting at
once. (Research by AGU Advances, reported in The Guardian.)
Nearly 19% of water systems tested in PA contain PFAS levels above new EPA standards.
It is often said that it takes about 12 times as much water to grow
an avocado as it does a tomato. That’s why avocado growing is a highly
controversial enterprise, and “anti-avocado militias” are forming in areas of
Mexico where water is scarce. The Guardian.
The Politics of PFAS
Wisconsin Republicans are withholding $125m designated for cleanup of
widespread PFAS contamination in drinking water and have said they will
only release the funds in exchange for immunity for polluters. Full story.
More on Rising Sea Levels
The world’s oceans are rising, and every year seawater reaches
farther inland, which poses an ever-increasing threat to homes,
businesses and critical infrastructure. By 2030, the number of critical
buildings and facilities at risk of routine and repeat flooding along US
coastlines is expected to grow by 20% compared to 2020 conditions.
Hundreds of US homes, schools and government buildings will face
repeated flooding by 2050 due to rising sea levels, a study has found,
disrupting the lives of millions of Americans. Nearly 3 million people
live in the 703 US coastal communities at risk of critical
infrastructure flooding as early as 2050.
Dr. Snow's Pump
A Landmark Event in the Understanding and Control of Waterborne Diseases
by Pure Water Annie
Gazette technical writer Pure Water Annie describes a landmark moment in the history of water’s role in disease.
Waterborne diseases like infectious hepatitis, bacterial dysentery, cholera, and giardiasis were common until fairly recently. Throughout the world, health impacts were staggering. Entire villages in Europe were wiped out by plagues in the 11th and 12th centuries. In 1848 and 1849 in a single cholera epidemic alone, 53,000 people died in London.
Dr. John Snow’s 1854 Pump Study is a landmark in the development of epidemiology (the study of infectious diseases).
The Broad Street Pump Findings
Dr. John Snow, a London obstetrician, became interested in the cause and transmission of cholera after witnessing severe outbreaks of the disease in the 1830s and 1840s. In 1849 he published a pamphlet that suggested that cholera was transmitted by contaminated drinking water. Many theories about the cause of cholera were in circulation at the time, and Dr. Snow’s polluted water theory was not widely accepted. The then-dominant theory was the miasma theory that stated that diseases such as cholera or the Black Death were caused by a noxious form of “bad air.” This was a short time before Pasteur’s “germ theory” became popular.
In 1854 Dr. Snow carefully plotted the locations of the illness and compared his findings to the subscriber lists of two private companies that provided water for London. His research showed that cholera occurred with greater frequency among the customers of one of the companies–the one that drew its water from the lower Thames river which was contaminated by London sewage. The other company used upper Thames water, which was less polluted.
Dr. Snow’s maps indicated a strong correlation between cholera cases and the proximity to the intersection of Cambridge and Broad Streets. The obvious conclusion was that the main cause of the cholera epidemic was the water drawn from a community pump on
Broad Street.
Although few at the time believed Dr. Snow’s theory, the handle was removed from the pump to prevent further use of the water and the plague of cholera was broken.
Both the pump and its handle are on public display today and Dr. Snow’s discovery remains a landmark achievement in public health.
Reference: Thomas V. Cech: Principles of Water Resources: History, Development, Management, and Policy. (John Wiley and Sons, 2005).
Water inequality on the Colorado River
by Jonathan Thompson
For the last couple of decades, water managers
in southern Nevada have promoted a plethora of conservation measures,
from fixing leaks in the vast system of pipes snaking beneath Las Vegas
to encouraging reduced-flow faucets to banning ornamental turf. Golf
courses are irrigated with treated wastewater, and water-gulping swamp
coolers are discouraged. All this has helped Nevada stay within tight
limits on how much it can draw from the Colorado River, bringing per
capita consumption down to just over 100 gallons per day — about
one-fourth of what it was in 1991.
But the sacrifices aren’t shared equally. A few miles off the Las
Vegas Strip, for example, on the far edge of a golf course and
residential development, sits a cluster of red-tile-roofed buildings.
With its athletic club, tennis court, pool, lawns and grandiose
structures, you might mistake it for a small private college or
exclusive resort. In fact, this complex is a single-family residence
that belonged to the Sultan of Brunei until November of last year, when a
company associated with tech-company founder Jeffrey Berns paid $25
million for it. The home, if you can call it that, is also Las Vegas’
largest water user, guzzling 13 million gallons in 2022 — more than 300
times what the average resident consumes. Run down the list of the Las
Vegas Valley Water District’s top 100 users, and you’ll see more of the
same: While most residents are increasingly thrifty with their water, a
select few — often associated with multimilliondollar homes — are
binging on the stuff.
Call it water inequality, or the growing disparity in water
consumption across the Colorado River Basin. Agriculture uses far more
water than cities, and some crops are thirstier than others;
Scottsdale’s per capita consumption is nine times that of Tucson’s;
California’s Imperial Irrigation District pulls about 10 times more
water from the river than all of Nevada; and the Sultan of Brunei’s Las
Vegas estate sucks up 35,000 gallons each day. Meanwhile, nearly
one-third of the Navajo Nation’s households lack running water
altogether, and residents there use as little as 10 gallons daily.
