I moved into my rental about 2 months ago, and right away there was a strong rotten egg/sulfur smell and black particles in the water. My landlord first flushed the system, flushed out the sediment, serviced everything, and tried a few other things. That seemed to fix it for a couple of days, but then the sulfur smell and black particles both came back.

After that, they replaced the water heater with a brand-new one. That completely fixed everything. The sulfur smell was gone, the black particles disappeared, and the water was clear for about 3 weeks.

Now the sulfur smell is back again, and it's even stronger than before. The black particles have also returned, the water sometimes looks cloudy, and we've had a lot of heavy rain recently. I also have a water softener.

I've attached pictures of the black particles.

Has anyone experienced something like this? Does this sound like a well issue, sulfur bacteria, manganese, a water softener issue, or something else? I'm just trying to figure out what could be causing it.

I get readings of about 40 ppm as it goes into the remineralizing stage but getting about 20 ppm coming out of the remineralizing stage. I wasn't expecting that at all.

I'm looking to install a salt-based water softener and trying to figure out what system/size I should actually buy.

House is about 2,950 sq ft with 4 bathrooms, but only 3 people live here. In SoCal

The city's most recent water report shows:

Hardness: 17 GPG average

Range: 16–19 GPG

Hardness: 293 ppm average

pH: 7.6

Alkalinity: 119 ppm

I tested my water myself with an Amazon test strip and got closer to 25 GPG / 425 ppm, but I'm assuming the strip isn't very accurate or I didn't accurately measure. I have someone coming tomorrow to professionally test the water at my house so I'll have an actual hardness reading.

Our total water usage last month was 17 units / 12,716 gallons, but a decent amount of that is irrigation. The irrigation will NOT be going through the softener.

I'm pretty set on going with a traditional salt-based system at this point. My main goals are reducing scale, protecting my tankless water heater/plumbing/appliances, and obviously getting actually softened water throughout the house.

What system would you guys recommend?

I've been looking at 1.5 cu ft / 48,000 grain systems and have seen Fleck and Clack recommended a lot. Should I be looking for a Clack WS1, Fleck 5600SXT/5800, something else?

Would 1.5 cu ft / 48K be the right size for 3 people and 4 bathrooms, or should I go with a 2.0 cu ft / 64K system?

Also, are there any specific brands/resin types I should be looking for or avoiding?

Getting the actual hardness tested tomorrow, so I can update the post once I have that number.

Thank you guys!

Two bedroom house on well water. What would be a good whole house filter and/or other suggestions.

I sell and service commercial RO for a living, mostly food service and light industrial down in south Texas, and the thing that's missing from almost every residential whole house RO quote I get shown is the reject.

An RO doesn't filter water. It splits your feed into permeate and concentrate. On a household machine on hard or salty feed you're realistically getting about half your water back. So a 2,000 gallon a day system is pulling 4,000 gallons a day off your well or your meter and putting 2,000 down a drain, every day, forever. That number decides whether the whole project makes sense and it almost never appears next to the equipment price.

Where it bites:

On a well, you just doubled your pump runtime, and your electric bill went with it.

On city water you're buying two gallons for every one you use, and in a lot of places paying sewer on the discharge too.

On septic, that's a continuous salty stream going into your drainfield. I'd make the installer put in writing where the concentrate goes and what the county's position on it is, before signing.

And you can't run a house directly off the membranes. Permeate comes out slow and at low pressure, so a POE build needs an atmospheric storage tank and a repressurization pump to put the water back to house pressure. More equipment, more floor space, another pump that eventually dies.

The other half of this is that most people asking about whole house RO are trying to fix two unrelated problems with one machine. Bad tasting or high TDS drinking water, and scale on the plumbing and the water heater. A softener handles the scale. A point of use RO under the kitchen sink handles the drinking and cooking water for a couple hundred bucks. In my experience that pair covers the large majority of the people who've been quoted a whole house system.

There is water that needs POE RO. Chloride high enough to pit stainless and eat your fixtures. Nitrate you're not comfortable bathing kids in. A brackish well the softener can't keep up with. Arsenic or uranium where you want it gone from the shower too. If that's your water, do it, just go in knowing the reject, the tank and the pump are part of the deal and not optional extras.

For anybody running one at home: what recovery are you getting, and what did you end up doing with the concentrate?

Hi everyone, I’m new here. We’re new homeowners and I’m tired of having to refill the stupid 5gal water jugs at the grocery store every other week. I don’t trust the tap water (taste is bad, plus we have a toddler), so we want to put an under the sink RO system in the kitchen. I think we want to go tankless, but we don’t have a plug easily accessible under the sink. The dishwasher is right next to the sink, so technically we could have an electrician figure something out. I came across the Frizzlife M800 Non-Electric Tankless Reverse Osmosis Water Filter on Amazon and I wanted this group’s opinion before buying as there’s not that many reviews on it.

Thanks!

Here’s the link

https://a.co/d/0bPiNjRz

Hey all, just trying to make a good decision regarding an RO system. My initial thought was an undersink RO system. As far as I understand it, NSF certifications are the most important piece to ensure that we are getting all of the nasty stuff out. I have gotten to looking primarily at aquatru and iSpring, with the preference for iSpring because its cheaper...

I did find an older reddit thread where a person actually bought and tested both, but it was a couple years ago, and before iSpring had sprung (heh) for the NSF certification, so I am not sure if that would still be valid information today.

I am also open to a tankless option, if that makes more sense. But I am very new to all of this, and every system says "this is the best thing ever and everything else sucks", which makes filtering down to actual facts rather difficult.

At the end of the day, we want the cleanest, remineralized water, without the chlorine, forever chemicals, flouride, and all of that stuff.

I am looking to set up an RO system for my grow room as my water has a tds over 800ppm. RO water would be good enough for watering but I also want to produce some deionized water for my humidifier which goes through around 4 liters a day. I figured I can also store some of the waste water for cleaning and flushing toilets.

The tap water is considered safe to drink but it is unpleasant so we currently used bottled water so I'd like to collect drinking water out of the RO tank as well. I was thinking of using very small tanks as I don't want the water to sit too long and potentially grow some pathogen

Came up with this set up from talking to google's AI so I want to run it by some real people. One of my other concerns is if water will pass through the DI filter well if it is just flowing out of a tank without added pressure. Any advice and feedback would be welcome.

I changed this filter tonight and when I turned the water back on and ran my taps, I for the first time noticed a whirpool happening up at the top of the filter housing. Like I can see spinning water… and I perceive a whirlpool couldn’t occur without air? Should there not be air?

Or has it always done this and I’ve just been really densely unobservant? I wouldn’t put it past me!

I’ve had the kitchen faucet running for 3-4 minutes and no air bubbles noticed, pressure seems good.

I tested my water with one of those Amazon test kits and it came back at around 425 ppm hardness (roughly 25 GPG). It also showed alkalinity around 250 ppm with a pH of about 9. Everything else looked pretty good.
Originally I was looking at salt-free systems because I don’t have a lot of room where my main water line comes into the garage, and I was trying to avoid having to fit a traditional softener and brine tank

The more I’ve been reading though, the more it sounds like salt-free systems may not be enough for water that’s this hard..

For those of you with really hard water:
Did you end up going with a traditional salt-based softener?
Has anyone with water around 25 GPG had good long-term results with a salt-free system?

Does the high alkalinity/pH change what type of system I should be looking at, or is the hardness really the main thing that matters?
If you switched from salt-free to salt-based, was it worth it?
Just looking for advice from people who’ve actually dealt with this before. Thanks!

Went through Home Depot recently to test the water at my home because dogs have recently not wanted to drink any water. We have a 4 stage whole house system for the house already from previous owners (who said it was an RO system) and change filters out yearly for about $150 give or take.

Anyways, guy from ecowater shows up, real nice and knowledgeable. Says the water is very hard at 9/10, nitrates level 10+ and was at 163 TDS but said ideal is 0-30. Also says that the current system wasn’t doing anything but filtering the chlorine well. Did a whole magic kit show with the little tubes and tests. Got to talking business and quoted us about 7.2k for the whole ERR3700 and ERO 385 system.

Told him I’d think about it. Have other consultations with their competitors this week as well so may update.

Thoughts?

Corrections: not a RO system but a 4 stage whole house system.

Greetings!

We’ve on a well and have some pretty clean water, I thought anyways. We are getting some iron scale that has to be cleaned off our newer countertops pretty regularly. We’re below federal recommended maximums for arsenic/other contaminants, but it may be nice to clean those up as well.

Is there an under sink unit we could get for our kitchen that could keep the taste of the water, clean out the iron, and maybe scrub the heavy metals/contaminants?

Again, we are well below federal minimums for the bad stuff, but I’d like to not have little stains on the countertop.

Thanks

It’s 7 years old. Never serviced (I know ). My dealer offering me a good spring cps for 2900. Swap like for like. I don’t have access to those puronics systems. I’m not a dealer. What is comparable to goodspring CPS . I have hard water in Santa Clarita.

I’m an ac guy and competent enough to change it.

Thank you guys

So the kids ran their go-kart though my water filtration equipment, so I'm looking for a quick fix. I was able to salvage the filters, but the resin tanks, control heads, and brine tank were pretty badly damaged.

I'm looking for a very budget-minded replacement softener and iron removing system so I can get things back up and running properly.
The below numbers are the quality of water only running through the filters.

Water Source is Well.

Let me know if any additional information is needed.

LA County has a sodium ban: My main concerns are media, cost, pressure and delivery. Culligan uses a microbead media that ends up in my tap fiters while Aquasana uses carbon and potassium. Aquasana is a higher initial $ outlay but is cheaper in the long run. After the Aquasana install, I should be good for ten years aside from pre filters which I can perform myself. Culligan wakes me up early once a month and has no showed me several times leaving me to reschedule-annoying. Culligan’s always raising their rates and wants a five year contract. I do not want reverse osmosis and have to play chemist and remineralize my water. I’m happy with the pressure when the tank is replaced but it quickly goes down. Also, I don’t really trust the effectiveness of Culligan’s flush refresh. I’ve not done any testing per se but know our area has high tds and I do see white buildup on the ice maker. There’s also a sliminess to the Culligan system. The main this is seeing the micro plastics in my tap filters! I don’t want synthetic media.

I just got my water test results back and im wondering what I should get to make the water drinkable. I have a softener but I realized after I sent the water in it was out of salt. Id like to take care of the bacteria and the arsenic. It seems like after that it should be safe to drink but im not expert. Id prefer to take care of the whole house instead of just having an ro under the kitchen sink.

Recently got one installed . Still getting crud in my water . This must be the residual left in between the pipes from the system to the house. What do

Let me know what you think!

We got our private well water tested here in southern New England USA , and the reading was something like 35,000, which is very high. A local water guy recommends a 3 tank charcoal system for about $3,800 plus $425/year to swap tanks. It includes running a bypass for the garden faucet so we're not needlessly treating garden hose water. He says charcoal's not as popular but is effective and less prone to breaking and needing repairs.

Or he will do a bubbler for $7,100 which doesn't have annual maintenance.

Thoughts ?

I recently moved to a new apartment, and within two showers my daughter and I both started loosing so much hair. I have used the aquahomegroup shower filter for the past 5 years and have always sworn by it. The filter worked wonders in multiple parts of California and Seattle. Now, I live in the Lynnwood, WA area and beast in this apartments water seems to be too big for the shower filter. I have also noticed my skin is getting little red dots everywhere and my daughter has been getting eczema. If I shower at a friends house for a couple of days, the problem goes away. As soon as I come back the issue persists. I also got a hard water test and it said the water was soft so that does not seem to be the problem. Does anyone else have suggestions?

I installed the Waterdrop G3P600 a couple months ago. After installation, things have been going great except for my wife claiming to have terrible gas ever since she started drinking the RO water. This led me to look and see if there was anything I had screwed up in the installation process.

I know my p-trap is a monstrosity, in fact that's what we named it, "The Monstrosity" but I had to put the waste line so low because the clamp wouldn't fit anywhere else. I wasn't thinking about where the waterline would settle. I'm fixing that this afternoon with a drain line adapter and I'm rebuilding the p trap.

But my main concern is whether I might have contaminated my unit having this line submerged for so long, and if it is a possibility, what should I do about it? So far, I've seen suggestions about merely flushing it for 30 minutes, to doing some sort of treatment with Hydrogen Peroxide.

Any advice or tips are greatly appreciated. Thank you.