Get your water tested. What is the pH? Why is it beyond your control?

The PH level according to the city water officials is between 6.8 and 7.2. I'm planning on having the water tested, but even if it confirms the PH level, what can I do to control it?

If pH from the city is correct, then your problem is likely not from low pH (acidic water). You still want to see what the pH is at your home - a lot can change between the city's pumps and your house.

If the pH at your home is too low, then you can install a piece of equipment to raise the pH of the water. In appearance, it would look very much like a softener, but it would be filled with calcite media that would dissolve into your water to raise pH.

Does your city obtain its water from wells or surface water?
How old is your home's plumbing?
Has there always been a softener installed and working?

When you get your water tested, use a certified lab. You want to know: pH, TDS, hardness, alkalinity, iron, manganese. You can probably leave it at that since you have city water. Fortunately for you, cities have to generate quarterly reports of water quality. These include extensive analysis. Get copies of the last few reports or provide a link to the online report and I can take a look and see if anything jumps out at me as a possible cause for your corrosion issues. If you will have to type in the results here, make sure to include the units.

Is there any other reason, other than low PH, that I would see a blue tinge in the water?

The water in my city is from wells,
The plumbing is about 14 years old,
When we moved in 6 months ago, we discovered that the softener wasn't working, we replaced it and now have water which tests at about 4 gpg hardness. We don't know how long the old softener wasn't working, but if the rest of the house is any indication, they never bothered to find out if it was ever working (they did absolutely no maintenance on the place, it is beautiful and clean inside and out, but they sold it when they realized it was time to invest some money in it). There is a certified lab in my city, and I'm planning on getting it tested there, I'll report back when I have the actual numbers. Thanks for taking the time to reply.

John

Many things an cause copper corrosion. Low pH, high pH, manganese deposits, bacterial contamination, high alkalinity. If you have pitting corrosion, that points to bacteria, manganese, or some other localized cause. Many times hardness buildup provides a cozy home for bacteria to grow, which then provides a place for more buildup and it becomes a vicious cycle.

If your corrosion is fairly even throughout the system (a sample piece of pipe would need to be cut out to determine thus) the cause is more likely to be pH, high alkalinity or other issue that affects the entire system. Are faucets corroded as well?

Unfortunately, these issues are difficult to diagnose because often more than one problem is involved. It is a good idea to disinfectant your system with chlorine. This will serve two purposes: kill bacteria in the system and form a protective oxide on copper surfaces. It will not, however, do anything to correct previous damage.

I actually have the piece of pipe the plumber cut out when he fixed the leak, I could open it and have a look. It's only about 5" long, but it should suffice. The faucets appear to be fine, no issues so far with any of them. I replaced the kitchen one and it appeared to be original and was working properly when we pulled it.

How would I introduce chlorine to the system? I know the water in our area is chlorinated, but when it was tested by the water softener sales guy (he was trying to sell me a de-chlorinator) it showed only small amounts.

As a side note, when we were troubleshooting the softener, we put it in and out of bypass a couple of times. We finally left it that way and got quotes on a new one. We were also dealing with a low water pressure issue, which, after looking at the softener, we thought could be caused by the feed pipes to and from the softener being only 1/2", so we got the softener installer to replace the lines from the main to and from the softener with larger ones. Well, as the work was being done, we discovered that the old softener had ruptured internally, and released millions of little green resin beads into our water system. These clogged up every faucet in the house and also went into our brand new water heater. On the advice of a plumber who thought this could be causing the blue/green tint to our water, we flushed out the heater last weekend, but there were almost no beads in it.

So we're back at copper being the source of the tint. Just thought I'd give you an idea of the fun we've been having at our new house.

Cheers
John

Ah, the joys of home ownership!

Resin beads shouldn't tint your water blue-green. You should add copper to the water analysis list so we're not guessing.

In order to disinfect the whole house, you need to have a location to introduce chlorine bleach. You want 50 ppm through the whole system. The softener should be placed in bypass during disinfection.

Typically, a valved branch as close to the home water inlet is possible is used to pump chlorinated water in while water outlets in the house are opened one at a time to ensure chlorinated water has reached each one. A plumber should be able to do this for you - many areas require this process prior to using a new water system so they should be familiar with the procedure.

Excellent. My wife should love the idea of a whole-home disinfection, I just wont tell her that she'll be the one running around turning faucets on and off.

Thanks for the advice. I'll get the water tested and post back results.

Just out of curiosity, has anyone here ever done a whole home pipe replacement? Just looking for an idea of cost, time and whatever anecdotes you can share.

Cheers
John

And while you are looking inside the pipe, you need to know that new copper pipe reacts with the water to form a protective coating inside the pipe.

If the water has low TDS it may be so clean the passivation coating cannot form, so copper keeps keeps dissolving from the pipe.

The corrosion folks at EPA did not get consulted about the new lower TDS standard.