Are You On Top Of Your Entire Water Distribution System?

Secondwind Water Systems recently helped out a community water system with 6 duplexes and two single-family homes that had very high iron. For reference, .3 parts per million is the minimum for seeing significant staining in your appliances, clothing, and even your hair.  This housing community has two wells, one has 6 parts per million and the other has 10 parts per million! For twenty years this community has lived with a lot of staining. Needless to say, they needed a new system to get the problem in hand.

Here’s a before image:

And here are a few installation photos and an ‘after’ image:

Secondwind installed a filter system to remove the iron. This allows us to deliver clean water to the two tanks, through the two pumps that then send the water through pipes to each of the homes.  We asked the community clean their tanks, but they were still getting iron staining in the homes.

Flush Your Pipes

Even if you have a great water treatment system in place, you have to flush your pipes.  If maintained properly, it should only take a short amount of time to accomplish this. Most often this only has to be done annually, however some distribution systems require the flushing to be done twice a year. The bottom line is that no matter how clean the water is, if it travels through pipes with years of build up, you will still get dirty water.

We discovered that the pipes feeding these homes hadn’t been flushed in years, thus the continued problem with their water.  Our Commercial Water Specialists helped this group flush their pipes a few weeks ago.  This is what 20 years of iron build up looks like!

All systems should have what are called blow offs or flush valves. These are large-diameter valves in the pipes that create high velocity when opened. This in turn breaks off all of the build up in the pipes.  Even when the best system is in place, you have to flush pipes.  If maintained properly, it should only take a short amount of time to flush. We took this image after 20 minutes of flushing, and this particular group is going to have to do quite a bit more over time to get the pipes to where they need to be.

Trust The Experts

Maintaining commercial or public water systems is all about consistency and a full understanding of the complexities and chemistry of treating water quality problems.  As the region’s commercial water quality experts, we’ve been helping commercial and public water customers solve the toughest water mysteries for decades.  You can count on the Secondwind Water team.