First, get the water tested to find out what you are dealing with. If it's just a little iron, you'll want to filter it out but it isn't a health concern.

You have to be very, very careful dealing with companies that sell water filtration systems. Some are outright scams that take consumers for thousands at a time.

The best defense is to educate yourself and DIY anything in your water system that is within your capabilites. You can get some good advice, including reasonably priced sources for filters at Terry Love's Well and Pump Forum.

Just one caveat, though. The forum strongly supports something unrelated to water quality issues called a cycle stop valve (CSV). Please be aware that several of the members have a financial interest in these devices. Other than that, it is a great forum.

Here is a link that might be useful: Terry Love's Well And Pump Forum

Make that companies that test water and sell water filtration systems based on the "results" of those tests.

peytonrd-

I feel your pain! This will be a little long, but it may save you lots of time searching online and calling water filter companies for information.

Our situation- We have been in our house 10 years and just developed the same problem with the orange stains. It started after a developer started building behind us. I did alot of research and this is what I found out:

How to get your water tested- You can take a sample of your water down to your local pool supply store and they can test it for you. They typically don't sell water filtration systems for houses, so they have no stake in giving false results. It cost me $20 for the tests: pH, iron content, hardness level, etc. From there I sent a sample to a company I found online called budgetwater (our pool place doesn't test for nitrates and there is a cattle farm next door). One of the other reasons I sent the sample to budgetwater was that they were one of the few companies that sold an iron filter vs. a water softener for iron removal. Budgetwater tests for free, but since they do sell every system under the sun, I wanted to see if their numbers matched what I got at the pool place...the numbers did match and no nitrates (Yeah!).

What I found out from my neighbors- It was very interesting that my neighbors all had local water system companies come out and they all recommended a water softener to filter the iron out to the tune of a few thousand dollars... yes that was a 'few thousand' dollars. Funny, none of us had hard water issues in any form before these guys from the water system companies came out for a visit (but the softeners did get rid of the iron to a certain extent).

Needed more research- I read on several postings on GardenWeb that you don't need a water softener for filtering iron...you need an iron filter. A water softener will do the job, but then you have to haul the salt and all the maintenance and expense that goes with it. Plus you shouldn't drink softened water so then you need to buy an expensive filter system for your kitchen sink! One guess who sells those expensive undersink filters.

What to do?- Evidently, there are several different types of iron filters you can buy. Based on the information we gathered online, we ordered the Terminox I.S.M. filter for our house from budgetwater.com for around $700. No maintenance other than an automatic backwash that the system does for you every night around 2am. No additional filters needed under the sink...just clear clean water again! The Terminox was the right choice for us. It may or may not be the right one for your house. Testing of your water for iron content, hardness, pH, etc. will definitely tell you more about what type of system you need to fix the iron issue and any other issues you may find out you have with your water.

Hope this helps & I wish you luck!

Here is a link that might be useful: Terminox Iron Filter Info

mydreamhome - can you tell me whether your water had a rotten egg smell before the filtration and whether the filtration eliminated that? We have that problem, along with brownish stains from the water, which we are trying to keep ahead of. Still investigating solutions to what we think is iron / sulfate (sulfure?) problems. We've only tested for drinking safety issues, not quality issues. But we know there are quality issues. Thanks!

janbanks-

Oh yes that lovely rotten egg smell! It's pretty much gone. From what I found in my research, the iron and that sulfur smell go hand in hand. I would definitely have your water tested to ensure that those are your only 2 problems. You can go through your county agriculture dept (the same dept. that handles septic/perc tests) but it can take a while to get the sample taken (they have to come out & do it) and then to get the results back--that's one of the reasons why I went with the pool place. It took 5 minutes to run the tests & it cost the same as the county too. Then I sent a sample to Budgetwater for them to test for free (I had to pay to ship the sample). Whichever way you go with testing a sample, you need to make sure you run the tap for about 5 mins then fill your sample bottle from the tap. Fill the bottle as full as possible and get it to the testing facility as quick as you can. The pool place was 15 minutes away from the house and I sent the budgetwater sample Priority Mail Flat Rate through the US Postal Service-it arrived & was tested the next day.

Creekside is right in doing whatever you can as a DIY project. Doing so helps keep you from being overcharged and upsold on a myriad of other products that you don't necessarily need.

In the meantime, BonAmi & Barkeepers Friend work really well on those stains! They work much better than any other product I've found. You can find them on the cleaning agent aisle. Helpful Tip: If you have a fabric shower curtain liner like I do & it is stained as well, you can also use these cleansers on it. Wet the stained portion of the curtain in the sink, sprinkle some Barkeepers friend on it and use a scrub brush to work the cleanser into the stains (you'll see them start to fade away). Do not rinse. Fill your washing machine with hot water, a little detergent and some of the cleanser then put the unrinsed curtain in. Let it agitate for a few minutes then turn it off and let it soak for 20-30 minutes and then turn it back on to finish the cycle.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

Oh yes that lovely rotten egg smell! It's pretty much gone. From what I found in my research, the iron and that sulfur smell go hand in hand.

In my experience, the presence of one doesn't always guaranty the presence of the other. I've been on four different wells over the years and have never had iron anywhere, but I have had a very bad case of sulfur water.

creekside-
Thanks for pointing out my error. I did not mean to imply that everytime you have a sulfur smell you also have an iron issue or vice versa. What I meant to write was '...the iron and that sulfur smell often go hand in hand.'

You can definitely just have a sulfur issue, just an iron issue, just a manganese issue, etc. You can also have any combination of them plus other issues as well. The smell is typically caused by iron/iron bacteria, manganese and/or sulfur. That's why it's so important to have the water tested to ensure that the right system/filter is installed based on what your individual needs are. The Terminox filter we bought that janbanks was inquiring about actually filters for all 3. Hence, no more stains & no more smell for us : )

I would like to thank all people above for such informative information!

Dream home, thank you for the heads up on whats out there! I will look into this.

my dreamhome... you purchased the terminox unit online, who installed it? a plumber? or was it DIY?

My DH is pretty handy so he did it himself. You can always order what you need and check out the directions when it arrives to see if you think you can handle it yourself. If you don't think you can do it yourself, simply call a plumber to come out and install it : )

Ditto to peytonroad's comments just above - thanks for this great information, dreamhome and others. Much appreciated!

Just bought our iron filter for our brand new well on ebay. We got the Fleck 7000 and it was affordable less than $600 shipped. Just got it yesterday so hopefully it works well.

Bumping this to see if any one has any other input or experiences they can share.
TIA

I had the sulphur smell problem one time. I turned the stat up a little and the problem went away.

When we built our home, the County tested our water (for the C.O.). Everything was OK. During the build, the plumber installed a relatively inexpesive whole-house filter as I requested. Not much too it. Just change the cartridge every three months. No stains in toilet and just a very faint smell. Our drinking water comes from the fridge, which also is filtered.

I can vouch for what creekside said about scams. I posted a long time ago about Roy Roy the Water Boy (I am not kidding, that is his marketing name) who came out to my house just when it was being finished to do his 50 dollar water test. Gee - i thought - what a great deal.

When the Water Boy turned to me and said, "well, i have some good news, and some bad news" I should have known what was coming. The good news was that we had very clear water and no bacteria. The bad news, it was very hard water and had some iron. And for the mere pidance of "fouty nine ninety five" he could fix it. I turned to my wife and said, what the heck, we can splurge for the 49.95 right now to fix this. And she said, "ah, you need to move the decimal point over a bit - he is talking about 4995!" And that was just for the hard water. To do the iron and the hard water, it was over 8 grand!!! DW then proceeded to ask the Water Boy for his pamphlet, and told him we would get back in touch with him if we decided to treat the water. After he left, she ripped the builder for yet another unforseen oops which we later discovered he knew about and was setting us up (probably getting a kick back from the water boy too).

Luckily I had this forum and did a lot of searching over on Plumbing. We wound up doing the water treatment ourselves after I read a bunch of posts - see posts from justalurker and aliceinwonderland - great info.

I took the water test results from the Water Boy and called Abundant Water Flow to order the water softener - see link below. They were very helpful and helped me size the unit. I had a water softener delivered to the house site within a few days after Water Boy left and the plumbers were still here to hook it up for a small fee. I put in the resin myself which is the hardest part. FYI - have two people put the resin the tank as spilling it on the floor is not a good idea - very hard to clean up. After I fixed the water hardness issue, i later added a Big Blue water filter to take out the small bit of iron we had plus remove an aftertaste from the Potassium Chloride we used as the brine.

In the end I did the entire water treatment for under 1500 bucks and our water is great. I am now my own water treatment maintenance guy and it isn't that hard. I test the water myself once per year with a DIY test kit just to make sure things are still OK. I make sure the brine tank is filled with pellets. I make sure the system is re-generating on the schedule. That's about it.

Hopefully this info will hlep others. If your water is not too bad (hardness and moderate iron, no bacteria), then a DIY approach works just fine. if you have really bad water and bacteria - then you probably want a pro to handle it.

Here is a link that might be useful: Abdundant Water Flow

Man (and woman) have lived with hard water since they first walked on the surface of the Earth. I have too. I'm 64 and am doing just fine and have all that money that would have been spent sitting in my retirement portfolio. The first rule of marketing is CREATE A NEED FOR THE PRODUCT, and in this case there wasn't one to begin with.

Very helfpful information here. I so appreciate it and yes I do think hard water is not good for consumption for a lifetime!

just checking to see if anyone else can share any details.

Hi, I'm new to this forum, but have been lurking for quite a while and have found the posts interesting, entertaining, and very informative. I'm a rank amateur when it comes to all things house and construction, but we've gained a bit of construction experience with the construction of our retirement home in southwest Florida, and reconstruction of our home on the southeast coast of Florida after its destruction in Hurricane Andrew.

Our retirement home is in a fairly rural area, and our water comes from (as our contractor told us) a 200 foot artesian well located in our back yard about 10-15 feet away from a tidal canal. The water straight from the well has a fairly strong sulfur smell, but the well system (which looks like everyone else's around here)has a device called a Duke aerator which functions very well to take the sulfur out of the water by aerating the water as it comes into the aerator- you can sometimes smell a bit of sulfur around little screened holes at the top of the aerator but it's not strong. From there it goes to a water softner, and then to two storage tanks, from which the water is pumped into the house on demand. There's a bit of a sulfur smell in the water in the house if the demand outstrips the capacity of the aerator and storage tanks, but we've learned to avoid this by not washing four loads of clothes at once while someone fills up the jacuzzi tub in the bathroom! We've also got a reverse osmosis system for water in the kitchen sink. The water tastes pretty good. The RO system is purely optional, but I am guessing that the other system outside is needed to optimize the condition of the water from the well. We know so little about the system (being new owners) but are hoping over the years we will learn enough about it to troubleshoot when things go wrong, as I am sure they will.

We did have a shallow well system ( 40 feet) at our house in southeast FL prior to Hurricane Andrew. This looked to be alot less complicated- I don't remember a sulfur smell from this water, and if I recall it went directly to a water softner and then to a bladder tank. That worked well, with minimum maintenance ( we had a neighbor who took care of all the well systems around for a living), but when the county put in water lines they made hookup to their system mandatory.

Good luck with your build, and whatever kind of a well system you end up with....