OT: Well water stinks

Our water stinks. To the point where our towels, clothes, and even ourselves smell wierd.I dont know what to think about it. The wife hates it, says clothes smell better before she washes them than after! All we have for treatment is a softener, and the well is not open type. To tell you the truth i dont even know where the well is at on our property. A line comes in the basement, goes to the pump, then to pressure tank. From there to the softener. What could be making the smell? Its hard to describe, but it kind of smells like musty old clothes. Like a wet towel thats been laying around for a few days. Any help would be appreciated!

Bet it is sulpur water, very common in Indiana. Won't hurt you but smells and tastes aweful.
Ask a well man or the county health department.

I would start by shocking the well with chlorine. It is an easy process, but you should hire someone if you are not comfortable with it. I prefer the chlorine tablets because they fall to the bottom of the well and seem to cover better.

Thanks. Forgot to mention im located in Western Iowa if that helps any.

I have sulfer water here in IN. I use Borax added to my laundry, it helps almost eliminates the bad smell. A box can be bought in the grocery store for $3-4.

I"m not sure of "musty clothes", but "rotten eggs" is the water heater, at my house anyway. Dan

How can i get to the well opening though? I have looked and looked and i dont know where it is.. All there is a line coming in the foundation in the west wall. And im not on rural water either. The previous owner died so i cant ask her.

we always just threw some bleach in the well. If you add too much it will taste awfull. Just pump a bunch of water out of the well and it will dilute itself to where it should be.

Thats the thing, the water heater is brand new. Im always finding wierd stuff out about this place. . .maybe it time to move.

dump a couple gallon of bleach down the well
run water out of ever faucet in the house until you smell the bleach
then shut off pump and leave town for at least 48 hours, longer is better
remove the anode that is screwed into the top of the new hot water tank and plug the hole
probably have to dig the well up and then you should extend it above ground
good luck
Ron

this might help.

http://www.aquaflowwater.com/id72.html

could one of you smart fellows on here show me how to make a click-able url?

We bought this place abt 6 years ago. House is 8-9 years old, everything new. Found out they didn't take the magnesium (sp) rod out of the heater. removed the rod, waters good now, it got so bad the whole house stank if we were gone over a weekend. There is a plug on the top of an electric or in the inputon a gas. Just my thoughts, Dan

We had that problem at my parents, put about 2 gallon of clorox in the well, run the water in the faucets until you smell the bleach, then let it sit for a day then just run water until the bleach dilutes out. I know where the well is but it was buried with no access, but a sealed well needs to have an air vent line somewhere, I just poured the bleach down the vent pipe. Sometimes a water heater needs the same treatment, turn off the breaker/gas and water pressure, loosen a fitting and put bleach in and let it sit a day.

Hot water only?

If so remove the anode magnesium rod from the water heater.

Things that come to mind, sulfer or clay. But, that doesn't mean that's what it is either. Have your water tested. You might be driving a new well. I grew up in Indiana and for most of my life, had shallow wells up to 25', the last shallow. The first was 1.5" at 15' including the well point, but we had problems with that well, including water quality. We found out that there were three shallow water veins in the area that we lived, and the first vein was poorer water quality. We drove a 2" down 20' and used it about a decade, but the well point went bed, so we pulled it and ran another 2" down 25' and had much better quality water. The place that I have now is a deep well down about 60', and one thing is for sure, water quality isn't an issue, although we have a water softener for everything but one fawcet that I installed off of the well ahead of the softner for dinking and cooking, and it has a filter that never seems to go bad. I change it periodically, but never seems to go bad.

I do have cousins that live south in Bremen by the lake where there is lots of clay, and to me, their shallow well water is the worst with incredible iron content. Hasn't affected them, but is the worst.

Have your water tested.

Mark

You might want to get your water tested, as it might be contaminated. Usually the local health department will have inexpensive test kits you can use. I would NOT drink the water, as it COULD make you sick. Gallons of good bottled water should be cheap at your supermarket and can be used for drinking, brushing teeth and cooking.

If I didn"t know where my water was coming from, I would first look for the well. The well might be in a pump house, or it might be a capped steel pipe 4 to 8 inches thick sticking up somewhere on the property. The cap may have pipes sticking out of it, or the pipes are probably buried several feet under the surface. There may be pipe plugs in the cap.

If your water is contaminated with bacteria, it might help to chlorinate your well by pouring several gallons of the cheapest unscented supermarket laundry bleach down in the well. Then you let the well sit for a day or two, using the minimum amount of water you can. Flushing toilets is OK, but doing laundry or taking showers might not be a good idea, as the bleach might cause damage to the clothes or to your skin. After a day or two, hook up a hose to an outside faucet and let the water run for a while on an area that you don"t really care if the plants die from the chlorine. After an hour or two, if the water from the hose no longer smells strongly of bleach, you can turn it off. Then go to each faucet in the house and run them until the chlorine odor is gone. Your water system SHOULD be clear of most bacteria, but you might want to test it again a couple of days later.

If chlorinating the well and running a lot of water through the system don"t help the odor problem, you might want to consult a professional to see what they think might be making the water stinky.

If it was only the hot water smelling bad, I would suspect the sacrificial anode in you hot water tank had eroded away.

I have a well water system, and sometimes the water has some odor, usually of sulfur. It also has quite a bit of dissolved iron, but the water softener system more or less takes care of that. We do not drink our well water, but use it for almost everything else.

I generally chlorinate my well about twice a year, with liquid bleach. About once a year I treat my well with citric acid, which removes a lot of the iron from the well, making it more soluble. After I treat the well either way, I let the hose run for a few hours, and probably waste a couple thousand gallons of water. After I treat my well, the water is lots better smelling and has less iron in it.

My water comes from a basalt formation that must have a great deal of iron in it. When I first drilled the well, the water was crystal clear, smelled and tasted great and was even fairly soft. But over time, it got more and more iron in it, so in our old house without a softener, it was necessary to brush the toilet every other day, or it would be brown below the water line. I suspect that my well and others in the area exposed the basalt to some air or oxygen, causing the existing iron to oxidize into a more soluble form, polluting the water.

There are devices to help make water safe and more pleasant. But doing the chlorination of the well is usually the first step, and it is probably something you could do yourself quite cheaply. Hope it works out for you. Good luck!

The problem is likely the water heater, not the well.

As others have already stated, remove the anode magnesium rod from the water heater. The smell will go away.

we had that smell also. it would stink the whole house up, just running the faucet. plumber friend said to put in an "Iron Curtain" it made the water perfect, it filters everything through sand and pumps air into the water to get rid of the smells. i cant say enough good about the system.

Bigbore, can you witch for water pipes using two L shaped wires? Some people can and some can't. Start witching outside the house where the well line comes in and try following the pipe to hopefully find the well. It's just a shot in the dark but it's free so you're not out anything if it doesn't work. Where are you in western Ia? Jim

I will try to answer as many questions as i can here.I live by Lake View, IA. The cold water smells too. We had the water tested, they said it was ok to drink but not for infants though. I think i have a general idea of where the well is now after visiting with a neighbor earlier this evening. He believes it to buried, and said its possibly as deep as his, which is 60 ft. The iron level is quite low here, hardly any staining at all. If i cant get bleach down into the belly of the beast, could i try using some inline filters or a reverse osmosis system? Or would that not help the smell? For $1200 i found out i can get hooked up to rural water. Im thinking maybe i should just go ahead and take that step.. .it would eliminate the worries of my well and be far less costly than digging a new one thats for sure.

Where did you get the Iron Curtain?

That's interesting. We have what the water conditioner dealer calls an IRON OX, or OXE, I'm not sure on the spelling. Sounds like it's the same thing as your "iron curtain". Seems to do the job when it works. It has a tank like a softener and even looks like one. If it's working right, there will be air in the faucet the first time you open it up in the morning. Mine came from a small, local water conditioning business that sells softeners and chlorinators. Jim

BigBore, where is Lake View, I am 10 minutes East of Cedar Rapids?

Do you know where Carroll is? Im 20 min north of Carroll or 40 min southwest of Fort Dodge.

I'm about 40 miles north and a twitch west of you. It might be good if you could ask other rural water users about the quality of the water and the hidden costs. If they don't have anything bad to say about it, go for it. Investigate that anode in your water heater first, if you haven't already. We went through the same thing with the stinking water 20 years ago. A water softener dealer told us to take out the anode rod and that cured the problem. Jim

Growing up on the farm we had a water tank. Some rats fell in the tank and died. This made the water smell. Maybe something fell in your well, and died. Stan

Sure do.

That area did have some coal mining, so sulphur could be a possibility. It really sounds like that based on your description of the smell.

I would just connect to city water if it is only $1200. It does not take much plumber or well driller time to add up to that.

Hook to city water or put a chlorine injection system in,when your pump comes on your cl2 injector runs also

jimmy

One thing that I am doing is that I put a dehumidifyer in my bathroom, to dry out the towels after using them. Towels can be used more than 1 or 2 times before washing them.
I just have to convince the wife that this actually works.

We have to do that ever now and then. Seems to last a coupla years. Years ago we did it and let it set while were in Florida for a coupla weeks. Now we just let it set over night and thru the next work day. Both works the same.

I can see that you still need to find your well. Hal and Fixerupper gave you some help with that. They are rarely buried, but it could be. Most likely it has been hidden by some shrubs or bushes so I would search for it in any vegetation of that sort in the direction that the pipe goes out through the foundation. If you don't find it that way it must have been covered during some landscape work to level the lawn on that side of the house. Keep in mind that the well driller that put it in would have wantwd to back straight in off the road fairly close to the house. You could ask neighbors about who may have done dirt work in the past. You will probably need to find some one with a metal detector.

some submersable pumps have been known to blow out a seal and seep oil into the water before dieing. if it could be called an oily smell it might be the seals leaking in the well pump.

Your 60 foot well does not qualify as a deep well, need to be close to 100 foot for that. Mine is 106 foot and one of the shallowest in the area with 200 foot being common with even 300 footers.

What kind of pump? Shallow well or deep well jet pump ? Time to find the well to make certain some clod didn't cover the well with soil. Then have you later come along and put the dog house and compost pile ontop of the well.

He said the pump is in the basement.

There are Professional level labs for actual particle by particle evaluation. (My sister runs one in Illinois) If it is not good for infants it is not good for you. If the issue is bacteria. it can cause a variety of low level immune reactions that persist for years.
If it is metals, it can be as bad or worse. (Iron is the least troublesome, though not tasty.)
I used a reverse osmosis system in Montana for drinking water very successfully. It was at the same price point as your hooking to public water, but at least you own it. Jim

A little off the beaten path but my mother's towels and most of her laundry stinks like "sour" old towels or something, NOT musty. She has very good city water to boot! But, as she gets into her 90's I believe she forgets her towels too long and they do get smelly and she's done it so many times they now have permanent odor, even right out of the dryer. Your hands stink from drying dishes. I even snuck one home and we tried various methods of washing and it still smelled. I now think her washer smells the same way and her dryer. Personally I think dryer sheets cause a build up of "scent" that sppoils over time but thats just my wild guess. One time about 15 yrs ago my wife and I had a few sets of towels that got that way and we ended up throwing them out.

Father in law farmed in that area,just east of Lake City You have to remember that whole area was one just a big Slough=Swamp wi4h q series of lakes/ Twin Lake, Wall Lake. Most of the land is tiled.FIL alway had bad smelling water.Owned the farm for over 100 years finally dixcovered it was iron constucted a big concrete holding tank Iron would settle to the bottom and was used foor cattle water for houshold use was drawn off of top. Bottom of tank would have sevral inches of rus accumalate. i know h used this for over fifty years.a old timer gave him the idea. gitrib

I think I am going to pull the rod out of my water heater when I get home...

Its a shallow well pump.

(quoted from post at 16:09:00 05/30/12) Its a shallow well pump.

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Possibly a hand dug well with a layer or dirt on top. Maybe time to dig and find out along with running a water sample. We are rather water cautious after the Walkerton Water disaster.

(quoted from post at 18:42:34 05/29/12) Our water stinks. To the point where our towels, clothes, and even ourselves smell wierd.I dont know what to think about it. The wife hates it, says clothes smell better before she washes them than after! All we have for treatment is a softener, and the well is not open type. To tell you the truth i dont even know where the well is at on our property. A line comes in the basement, goes to the pump, then to pressure tank. From there to the softener. What could be making the smell? Its hard to describe, but it kind of smells like musty old clothes. Like a wet towel thats been laying around for a few days. Any help would be appreciated!

Click to expand...

As others said, get your water tested, then you'll know what's in it. In my case, we have decent water, but a fair bit of iron, sulphur and calcium. The water had a swampy smell. A water softener takes care of the calcium. (It will remove a small amount of iron.) We have a fair bit of iron, so we installed a good iron filter- it injects air into the water, which helps the filter bed remove it better. The sulphur also gets removed with the iron, and my water is great, with NO smell at all. The iron filter I have doesn't need any chemical added to it either. Good luck!

What happened with that if you dont mind me asking?

(quoted from post at 19:10:54 05/30/12) What happened with that if you dont mind me asking?

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Walkerton?

Best to google walkerton water and illness or death . Problem was a spineless engineer with little real world experience and stunned lazy municipal employees, Overly cost cautious town council making decisions and the old boys protection network.Result was many dead, sick and crippled town folk from the public water supply.

Had to shock my well, lasted a year, then rotten egg smell came back...many said it is usually a breach in the system, found a leak at the booster, rebuilt booster with new diaphram and such, also replaced pressure tank that had leaky bladder, shocked again after all the fixes and that took care of it. Consider a breached system, leak or some other thing not right, fix that, shock afterward and that may solve it...it did for me.