Could someone please check our setup?

[Micro]

New guy but I've lurked a long time and hopefully learned something
I spent my working career building water, wastewater, and water reclamation plants for cities, counties, and the state, but this small scale treatment is a different world entirely
I'll try to include all the relevant info.

2 (and only ever 2) old folks, 1 retired and home all day, 1 still working full time and gone 10-12 hours a day.
We have a new on-demand electric water heater, so we want to keep line deposits to the absolute minimum.

Water quality (Central Florida well water) -
0.9 mg/L Iron
<0.1 mg/L Hydrogen Sulfide
<0.1 mg/L Tannins
181 mg/L TDS
110 mg/L (6.43 gpg) Hardness
7.8 pH
0.019 mg/L Nitrate
13 mg/L Chloride

We just recently (3 months ago) switched from a "big box" store water softener to a Fleck unit -
Fleck 2510SXT (1" in and out)
48,000 grain unit
10" x 54" Tank
1.5 cu. ft. Fine Mesh Softening Resin (just the 2 of us and the highest flow is a tub occasionally, shower usually)
Morton Clean and Protect Rust Defense water softening pellets (formally called Rust Remover)
BLFC : 0.5 gpm
DLFC : 2.4 gpm

Our settings on the Fleck 2510Sxt are -
(shooting for salt lb/cu.ft. = 7)
DF = Gal ; Units
VT = dF2b ; Downflow/Upflow, Double Backwash
CT = Fd ; Meter Delayed regen trigger
NT = 1; Number of tanks
C = 32.0 ; capacity in 1000 grains
H = 14 ; Hardness grains after compensation
RS = SF ; Safety Factor
SF = 10 ; percent
DO = 14 ; Day Override
RT = 1:00 ; Regen time (default 2 AM)
B1 = 8 ; Backwash 1 (minutes)
Bd = 60 ; Brine draw minutes
B2 = 5 ; Backwash 2 (minutes)
RR = 10 ; Rapid Rinse minutes
BF = 7 ; Brine fill minutes
FM = t1.0 ; 1" Turbine meter

Our concern is that about the 7 day mark we begin see some slight reddening in the toilet bowl (ferric iron?) and also a definite darkening toward blackish in the bowl (manganese?).
(We failed to test for manganese, but surrounding wells in our area are in the 8-14 mg/L range)
EDIT : I dug back through my paperwork and this is wrong. The manganese levels of my neighbors are 0.008 and 0.014 mg/L. Sorry for the confusion.
It does progress very slowly, but we would like to eliminate it altogether.
This staining doesn't occur in the toilet tank, just the bowl.
There are some lingering iron slime deposits on the metal in the tank, but those are gradually disappearing.
The dishwasher has a SS tub and it shows a "rainbow" stain, if that helps?

We don't want to use a filter cartridge system, as we tried that with our old softener and it just went through 20" cartridges ($) and made little difference.
We are on a septic tank so we really don't want to use chlorine on a regular basis.
We were thinking a Catalytic Carbon filter ahead of the water softener (?) or is there something we could change in our settings without running up our salt costs a lot?

 

[ditttohead]

Since you likely have h2s, manganese and iron a properly designed Katalox light or similar media with h2o2 injection would make the most sense. It is fairly cheap. simple, and very effective. It is a little tricky setting up the h2o2... but by using the xtr2 controller from Fleck with an integrated meter it can be very simple.

 

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[Micro]

That wasn't a response I was expecting
As the water quality tests showed (from OP) -
<0.1 mg/L Hydrogen Sulfide
0.9 mg/L Iron
That seems a little overkill ? or No??
Having just purchased the Fleck 2510SXT system 3 months ago, we'd like to find a way to work with it, rather than replace it.
Is that not possible??

 

[Micro]

I dug back through my paperwork and the manganese levels of my neighbors are 0.008 and 0.014 mg/L, not 8-14 mg/L. Sorry for the confusion, I shouldn't have gone from memory on this one result.
I corrected the OP to reflect this.
All the other Water Quality results are directly from our well testing report.
Hopefully this makes a usable difference in our existing system?
So does a Fleck valve w/air injection and Catalytic Carbon as a pre-treat to the water softener look feasible now or are we off-base?

 

[Reach4]

The iron treatment system would be nice, and would let you save salt. It also treats other things that a softener will not. If you had a sulfur smell, that would make the backwashing iron+etc filter an easier decision.

My iron+H2S filter uses Centaur Carbon. It works great for me. I think it is not the same as generic catalytic carbon, but I cannot be sure. Centaur Carbon is roughly similar in price to KL.

I did not go through all of your numbers, but they looked mostly OK at first glance. The one thing I would do for now is consider DO=6.

Have you sanitized your well well and plumbing? I have a deep-well sanitizing writeup, and I took a stab at a 2 inch shallow well writeup. That one seems less good. Having the iron bacteria killed off, or at least knocked down for a while, could make things better.

 

[Micro]

I would be very interested in reading your deep well sanitizing write up.
Where? Can you link to it?
We have not sanitized the house plumbing, but both baths and the kitchen checked negative for coliforms.
Our piping is all PVC and PEX.
We'd rather not risk killing the bacteria in the septic tank with high doses of Chlorine going through the house piping.
Blowing the well piping off after sanitizing it isn't a problem though, we are set up for that, both ahead of or after the water softener.
Which would be the better place?

With the Iron, H2S, Tannins and Mg levels so (relatively) low (for our area) we thought DO=14 would work and save salt, but I believe you are right 6 or maybe even 5 would be better.
With the TDS @181, we were also thinking that they may be preventing the softener from removing our low levels due to physical (?) fouling (buildup) in or on the media, possibly requiring a more frequent backwash to simply mechanically clean the media of TDS.
We do notice a pressure drop across the softener @ DO=14.
Softening and taste has never been an issue. The softener drops the hardness to 0 gpg.
This also led us to thinking that an air injected catalytic carbon filter ahead of the water softener seemed to be the best solution to handle all those problems without the use of more chemicals (continued monthly expense vs. several years later expense for media replacement).
Does that make any sense?

 

[Reach4]

I would be very interested in reading your deep well sanitizing write up.
Where? Can you link to it?

https://terrylove.com/forums/index....izing-extra-attention-to-4-inch-casing.65845/ Your iron is over double mine. I put in my iron+h2s system mainly for the sulfur, but it is very nice to have the iron out. I have lab water test results from before and after the filter. My raw water arsenic is below the MCL, but it was nice to see the level drop to below the test sensitivity after the filter.

My well water may have more dissolved oxygen than some. I bought my system because a friend in the area had had good results from that system.

We'd rather not risk killing the bacteria in the septic tank with high doses of Chlorine going through the house piping.

I minimize how much I put down the drain. A utility pump could move water from a tub or sink basin to a hose that passes water to the ditch.

With the Iron, H2S, Tannins and Mg levels so (relatively) low (for our area) we thought DO=14 would work and save salt, but I believe you are right 6 or maybe even 5 would be better.

That can be a temporizing thing. I have hope that sanitizing would knock down IRB and help the situation. There are feeders that meter a phosphoric acid solution, via a wick, into the brine tank. Res-up and ResCare are the two brands I know of.

Iron Out can be useful. https://terrylove.com/forums/index.php?threads/garys-trick-and-how-effective-is-iron-out.47363/

Air injected needs some cleaning, maybe once or twice per year. My system uses a 15 gallon solution tank. I add a gallon of bleach every 33 days, and top up with softened water. The bleach is only used during the regeneration, every 3 days. That comes out to about 1.5 cups of bleach for every regen. https://www.clorox.com/dr-laundry/septic-tanks-and-bleach/ Maybe I should try to measure the residual bleach levels from my iron+sulfur system.

TDS @181 is not high.

 

[Micro]

dittohead and Reach4 - Thanks for your help