Mike R said:
I recently changed the pressure switch on my well after it stopped working one day. It was a 20 - 40, I went up to a 30 - 50. A couple days later, I started getting a massive amount of what appears to be rust scale. (brownish red, very course particles) Every day I have to change the whole house filter because it becomes almost completely clogged and water just trickles from the faucets. I have very high amounts of iron in the water where I live. I have had to change nearly all of the pipes in the house from Galvanized to copper. Also, after the pressure switch, I have a whole house filter, then an iron filter, then a water softener. The water is pretty good after that. But now this clogging problem has been going on for at least 2 weeks. Is it possible that the pipes leading to the well pump are badly corroded causing this? Any other thoughts on what to do to fix it?
Raising the pressure causes you to use more water. That causes more (recovery) water to run into the well than before. That water could contain more iron than you had before. You may be in a drought and have less water in the well now than before. Using more water may cause the water level in the well to fall farther than it used to, exposing more of the casing etc.. That can cause more rusting of the casing or rust to fall off into the water OR more air in the well, air is an oxidizer (oxygen)... causes more of the iron in the water to oxidize the existing ferrous iron in the water in the well which causes more ferric iron (read rust) in the water and/or the well which is then sucked into the pump and delivered to the "whole house" filter which shouldn't be used because they were never designed or meant to be used as POE (point of entry) equipment.
So.... then you have an iron filter which IS designed to remove what you are removing with the misapplied disposable cartridge filter... and since your pressure/flow rate has fallen the iron filter is not properly backwashed which causes a higher pressure/flow loss. And then the softener doesn't backwash correctly and that causes more pressure/flow loss.... and failure of each to do their job of removing the iron and hardness in your water
I suggest removing the cartridge, and housing if you have the time and then putting the iron filter into the backwash position and unplugging it for 10 minutes and then plug it in again and allow it to finish on its own. You want a 10 plus minute longer than normal backwash. At the same time, actually before doing that, add 2-3 gallons of water to the water in the softener's brine tank, the nput the filter into that backwash, then wait two hours and put the softener into a manual regeneration. Do not use water while either are in backwash or regeneration; the softener will take roughly 1.5 hours after you start the manual regeneration.
Then I suggest a water treatment guy, pump guy, well driller or plumber that is into this, to pull the pump to inspect the inlet and clean it and the drop pipe or replace the drop pipe and then sanitize/clean the well. The drop pipe may be filled with rust. They may check the well/pump depths and raise the pump 5-10 feet to get it out of any sediment.
Then, it sounds to me, you may be a candidate for different, correctly sized iron treatment equipment than you have now. You may have IRB (iron related bacteria) in the well and iron filter and softener. You would start with checking to see if you have IRB and have a water test done for iron, pH and hardness at least and then check your present equipment size based on the correect size for your water quality and peak demand gpm use along with the total gallons of water used per day.
