OT:chlorinating rural wells?

1. Switch your water softener to bypass, as Clorox at high levels can trash the resin bed.

2. Take the cover off your wellhead. Dump some Clorox in. There are formulas on the web for determining how much, but I'd just dump in half a gallon to start; you can always add more.

3. Take a garden hose and use it to run water down the well. Stop when when you can smell chlorine coming from the hose.

4. Open up the cold water taps in the hose until you can smell chlorine in each, then turn them off.

5. Open up the hot water taps and run them until you can smell chlorine. You might as well turn off your water heater, since you'll flush it out later.

6. Leave the house for a few hours.

7. Run your taps until you no longer smell chlorine, or at least it's mostly gone. There will probably be some residual chlorine for a few days. You can turn your water softener back on once the worst of the smell is gone.

If your problem is temporarily fixed, then you might be a candidate for the chlorinator.

(I thought I was going to have to do something similar, until I figured out that I just needed to swap out my water heater anode to fix the rotten egg smell in my water. I'll post a message in tool talk on that.)

I cleared up my father-in-law's well by mixing a gallon of Chlorox into 10 gallons of water. I coulped together enoufgh garden hose to reach the BOTTOM of the well (almost 200 feet) We fed the hose into the casing until it hit bottom and he started pouring the chlorox mixture into the hose as I withdrew it. We still had chlorine left when it was all out, so I fed it back into the well as he kept pouring it in.

After sitting overnight, he pumped it out until no chlorine odor remained. It worked so well that he was able to remove all the filters, precipitators and other gimmicks he spent so much money on in a vain attempt to treat it.

I caution that this might not work for everyone. This case was an iron lined well that had sat for 20 years. If the red is caused by OTHER than iron bacteria, or if the bacteria is in the aquifer, this won't work. Good Luck!