Well Filter Causes Low Pressure

[nickyg]

I have a well and pressure tank in my new home. After the pressure tank there is a canister style water filter. I replaced the filter recently and now my water pressure is terrible. On my type of GE filter you can turn a dial and bypass the filter. I currenly have the filter bypassed in order to get better pressure throughout the house.... Why is this happening?? Does my filter have to be rated for a certain flow??

Thanks,
NickyG

 

[Speedbump]

Those filters are for one faucet not a whole house contrary to what the big box stores say.

And there is nothing that filter is trapping that will harm you in any way.

I would leave it in bypass or just remove it completely.

If you want to filter your water have it tested and see what type of real filter you may need.

bob...

 

[Sponsor]

 

[nickyg]

When we bought the house the water passed the inspection, but that may have only been for major problems..... Where can I have my water tested??? I think I can get a loose wound filter to replace the one I bought, just to pick up rust and dirt particles.. What do you think? The old filter was completely rust colored, but I dont know how long it was in there.

 

[Bob NH]

You can often get your water tested at a county laboratory, or at a water treatment company.

Filters take out only suspended solids; not dissolved solids such as cause hardness. You can also get treatment systems that convert dissolved materials to suspended materials that can be filtered.

Plugging filters is not an indication of a filter problem; it is an indication that you are removing what you don't want in your water. If it plugs too often, you need more filter area. Increasing the filter area (number and size of cartridges) actually REDUCES your annual cartridge cost. If you double the number of cartridges you will get 1.5 to 2 times as much water through EACH cartridge and you will increase the change cycle by a factor of 3 to 4.

If you determine that you need or want to remove something that is filterable, then you need a filter that will remove the finest particles that you want to remove, and you need enough filter area so that you don't have too much pressure loss. The absolute minimum cartridge filter that I would use is one of the 20" long "Big Blue" size or two of the 20" long standard size housings.

There are differences of opinion among the board members about whether to use granular backwashable filters or cartridge filters. I prefer the cartridge filters for the following reasons:
1. They remove finer particles than you can remove with granular filters without chemical pretreatment.
2. They are less expensive to install to get adequate area, and they have lower life cycle cost for the same filtration effectiveness.

First, determine if you want a filter. Then determine which filter best suits your needs.

 

[Alleycat]

NickyG,
As previous posts said, get the water tested, then you know whether/ what kind of filter you need. You can probably find several companies in the yellow pages. Talk to more than one company and ask lots of questions. And I found my state department of environmental protection to be a tremendous resource for information about well water and testing. Also, filtering aside, I suggest that anyone with a well get their water tested every year or two. Just because it tests clean once doesn't mean the well cannot ever be compromised. I'm not in the business - I'm just a homeowner, but our last house tested fine when we built it, but 10 years later, when we sold it, we discovered that the well water had unacceptable levels of coliform (which explained the vague stomach aches I had been experiencing!!)
good luck ~

 

[Speedbump]

I am one of the backwashable filter guys Bob mentioned. His 20 inch filters are a great improvement over the Big Box stores "Whole house filters".

Cartridge filters cannot remove hardness or iron. Which are the two biggest problems with well water. This is why I advocate backwashable media filters. I know of nothing in well water that a string wound filter will remove that would be harmful to you.

bob...

 

[Gary Slusser]

I suggest that with any type of water treatment, you need to learn/know what you need, as opposed to what you want. Otherwise you can quickly become a victim of sales people/hype.

Visually, we can't see particles less than 50-45 micron. The lower the number the smaller the particle. So why filter invisible 'dirt'? It won't harm you, the vast majority of appliances, including softeners, or well pump pressure tanks.

So really, what good are these disposable cartridge type filters, that are being misapplied as "whole house" filters, when they were never meant to be used as POE (point of entry) treatment? And if you ever get a BB 4.5" x 20" housing and cartrdige and replace the cartridge once after beoing installed for say 6-12 months, you won't want to do it again. It's very heavy and dirty and you unscrew it and take all the weight, it is filled with water,,, thereby difficult to do without dropping it and breaking the sump. And people won't change their much smaller types on schedule although it is not hard at all...

Unless you have a Kinetico packed resin bed upfow service softener, or an upflow AN filter etc., you don't 'need' one. And I say you shouldn't WANT one either. I say that based on my 19 years of water treatment experience with thousands of customers and reading/replying to many more thousands of posts like yours nickyg.

If the cartridge is getting yellow to orange reddish brown, you have an iron and/or manganese, maybe H2S, problem, and no disposable cartridge filter of any type or size will prevent them from going right on through it, to still cause problems.