shocking a drilled well

[blind drunk]

We need to shock our well to help minimize the rotten egg smell we sometimes get. I've looked it up but was wondering if any member has does this before. All I plan on doing is opening up the well, dropping 1.5 liters of bleach and then recirculating the well water using the garden hose to make sure the bleach gets evenly distributed in the well water. Then I'll open up the taps until I get that lovely bleach smell and shut everything down for 48 hours. Then purge the system mostly through the outside garden hose to keep the bleach out of the septic tank.

Does this sound about right?

Thanks.

[LWTCS]

We have some stank water here.

We run it thru the softener and a carbon filter and then resign to polish it up. W have a backwash system that runs bleach water through the system several times a week.....
We could get by with less if our well was deeper and into the aquifer....

[rad14701]

I'm in the process of cleaning up the cistern at my fathers place... Well, I've actually been working at it for a couple of months over the summer... Not only off smells but coliform as well... I've removed one chipmunk and four mice carcasses out as well as an unknown type of aquatic weed... I've been treating with a half gallon of Clorox in the 1000 gallon cistern... I've pumped it dry, treated, and allowed it to refill twice...

For a standard well casing the recommendation is 1/2 cup of chlorine in 5 gallons of water, dumped down the well casing... Run water until the chlorine smell goes away... I also have some tablets that indicate the absence of chlorine that need to be used prior to submitting another water sample to the county for testing... One tablet in 1/2 ounce of water... A pink tint indicates the presence of chlorine while clear indicates its absence...

[MuleKicker]

Make damn sure you run the outside spigots after the bleach has sat for a while. Dont run it through the house. You then get that bleach through your softener and water heater and everything else in the house. Not what you want, takes a lot longer to rid the water completely of the smell.
Pour the bleach down the casing and let it sit for at least a day. dont run any water in the house or outside. Then turn a garden hose on and let it run till clear. Thats how we have always done it.

[rad14701]

Make damn sure you run the outside spigots after the bleach has sat for a while. Dont run it through the house. You then get that bleach through your softener and water heater and everything else in the house. Not what you want, takes a lot longer to rid the water completely of the smell.
Pour the bleach down the casing and let it sit for at least a day. dont run any water in the house or outside. Then turn a garden hose on and let it run till clear. Thats how we have always done it.

The directions I have from the county explicitly state to run water through all water circuits including the water heater to kill off the coliform bacteria... The hot water tank, while fairly new, was the worst component because the temperature wasn't turned up high enough to kill the bacteria... The hot water smelled like death...

For sulfur smell alone, without coliform, might require a different treatment regimen... A whole house water filter cartridge which specifically targets sulfur would help... I use 5 micron filters to clean up what otherwise looks like swamp water...

[Bushman]

I have a well and in August if you don't treat it it can get bad, currently I now have a water purification system but before I added bleach ran it through the garden hose until I could smell it then I let it sit 12 hours then ran again through the garden hose until the bleach smell was gone. This is what was recommended by our water district.

[maheel]

do you drink the well water ? is it the / your only household supply ?

(kind of talking to all well users in the thread)

[Bushman]

Yes, I live on a lake and most people draw their drinking water from the lake, mine is better as surface water can easily be contaminated. My well has been tested and always comes out good, although in August when the weather has been warm it can pick up an off smell. My purification system seems to handle it. I also use the well water for all my fermentation rather than distilled water.

PS: I live in a mountain area and the well water is considered artisian and I drink directly from the tap no brita filtering here!

[blind drunk]

Thanks guys, more or less what I was thinking. There are no coliform bacteria in the well, just iron and manganese which, I'm told, are the stinky water culprits in this case. When we run the water for a couple of days, it clears up nice, except for the hot water. Seems like the heat releases the water's inner smell. Btw, this is at our cottage that we're slowly working on getting finished. The building inspector is gonna want something done, so I might also look into a micron filter (thanks rad) as well as chlorine shocking. We've been drinking it on and off for years; there's nothing wrong with it from a health point of view.

Thanks again. Who knew there's so much stank water out there.

[ro palinca]

We need to shock our well to help minimize the rotten egg smell we sometimes get. I've looked it up but was wondering if any member has does this before. All I plan on doing is opening up the well, dropping 1.5 liters of bleach and then recirculating the well water using the garden hose to make sure the bleach gets evenly distributed in the well water. Then I'll open up the taps until I get that lovely bleach smell and shut everything down for 48 hours. Then purge the system mostly through the outside garden hose to keep the bleach out of the septic tank.

Does this sound about right?

Thanks.

what is the depth of your well? How are the aquifers distributed in your area? what is the diameter of the well and what kind of insulation against the first phreatic water? How is your neighborhood regarding (pseudo)septic tanks, agricultural farmlands or any other pollution source/distance from your well?

[HolyBear]

Ifn its a rotten egg smell its prolly Sulfur. Magnesium taste more like tin (metal) to me. I don't know how to cure it....

Reminds me of when I was a boy..., my Paw and I went to help a neighbor that wasn't getting enough water from his well. Paw and the neighbor thought they should blow the well in order to shock the rocks to crack em open to allow more water in. They put a cap in a stick of dynamite and mixed a 5gal bucket of ammonium nitrate and diesel. Put it all down the well, covered with a car hood and set an engine block on top....BOOM!!!!

I don't think we ever found the engine block, I do remember watching the car hood flip over and over again as it came down outta the sky. It was wayyyy up there. All the windows were broken out pf the front of neighbors house. The well was never used again...

[blind drunk]

We need to shock our well to help minimize the rotten egg smell we sometimes get. I've looked it up but was wondering if any member has does this before. All I plan on doing is opening up the well, dropping 1.5 liters of bleach and then recirculating the well water using the garden hose to make sure the bleach gets evenly distributed in the well water. Then I'll open up the taps until I get that lovely bleach smell and shut everything down for 48 hours. Then purge the system mostly through the outside garden hose to keep the bleach out of the septic tank.

Does this sound about right?

Thanks.

what is the depth of your well? How are the aquifers distributed in your area? what is the diameter of the well and what kind of insulation against the first phreatic water? How is your neighborhood regarding (pseudo)septic tanks, agricultural farmlands or any other pollution source/distance from your well?

6" diameter @ 122 feet. It's a residential area, no farming. Septic fields are a couple of hundred feet distance from the wells, in general. I think I know why yer asking, but I'm 100% sure it's not external contamination, except maybe from the drilling machines many years ago. They can sometimes introduce nasties into the well at the time of drilling.

[ro palinca]

you didn't say anything about: what kind of insulation against the first phreatic water? and what distribution of water table you have in your area. I can provide a solution if I know the variables.

[blind drunk]

you didn't say anything about: what kind of insulation against the first phreatic water? and what distribution of water table you have in your area. I can provide a solution if I know the variables.

All I know is the water is pumped into a pressure tank, via a well pump, and then from there the water goes to all of the fixtures. I know nothing about the distribution of the water table. Water is entering the well @ 25 below surface level, if that means anything.

[ro palinca]

sorry, don't get me wrong but I can't compute the data for this. Maybe you can ask a neighbour about the water table and the insulation, but what can I say is that : Cl ; clorhine ; bleach ; ....etc is not a solution for maintaining a well sustainable.

[blind drunk]

What do you mean by insulation?

[ro palinca]

in this case, insulation means that you must make a hydraulic stop between the first and the second water-table.

[blind drunk]

in this case, insulation means that you must make a hydraulic stop between the first and the second water-table.

As far as I know, no such hydraulic break exists. Here, they drill a hole and when they hit water they drill some more until they hit water again, or not. Alot of times they drill deeper just to allow for some water storage.