Well Water

Thank you for the water heater trick! I'm going to try that this weekend. I've noticed the smell starting to come back in the hot water. It's not as bad as it was before but I can detect it again. So far the cold water is fine and I haven't had to run the hose to clear out the dirty water in a few days.

I did install a reverse osmosis system under the kitchen sink. So far, so good with the water it's producing.

 

While a water softener can remove a limited amount of iron it is NOT designed to be an iron filter, it is designed to be a water softener. If you have hard water, use a softener. If you have an iron problem, use an iron filter. Any reputable water softener manufacturer will not try and solve an iron problem with their softener. This is one of those times when if the only tool you have is a hammer then everything looks like a nail.

Greensand and manganese oxide filters are standard and effective ways to remove dissolved iron, manganese, and sulfur from your water.

 

Technically iron is hardness as is any dissolved divalent cation including manganese, aluminum and the two most commonly referred to as "hardness" calcium and magnesium, all of them can be effectively treated with a softener (ion exchange)

I have been treating 18 ppm dissolved iron for ten years with a softener, guaranteed by a reputable company, staffed by professionals with the credentials to know what they are talking about. The iron "filter" previous to this system failed miserably. The problem with high dissolved iron is when it falls out of solution it can become difficult to filter as a precipitate. This is especially true in a household environment where the water can sit unmoving for long periods of time allowing the iron precipitate to settle and form "puddles" of precipitate which when they hit the filter all at once can easily overwhelm its filtering capacity. Some iron filters try to overcome this problem by precipitating the iron just before filtering, this can work well sometimes. The problem here is the reaction (oxidation) of the dissolved iron into iron precipitate can sometimes take a bit of time and may not go to completion before going through the filter leading to some iron bleed through.

Greensand and manganese oxide filters are effective for treating iron but certainly not the only option.

 

I'm not very familiar with fine mesh resin, wondering if in addition to ion exchange it does a little precipitate filtering also? That's why I asked you about your neutralizer being before your softener, raising the pH will cause some of the dissolved iron to fall out of solution.

Neutralizing after the softener will raise the hardness a bit but not much.

 

Right, see my edit, neutralizing after the softener will add some hardness back to the water, but not much...that's the way mine is set up, you do not want 18 ppm iron coming out of solution it is not fun to deal with.