Thanks so much for your insight! It's great to be able to draw on all of your experience - I truly appreciate it
Here are the results from the water test done last week:
Hardness: 15 gpg
Iron: (clear water) 1.5 ppm
Sulphur: .5 ppm
TDS: 290 ppm
PH: 7
They said the Sulfur level isn't very bad at all. 0.5ppm H2S. But that Iron is very high and that the combination makes it seem worse than it is. He said most of the corrosion inside the house on the fixtures was from the hard water. We have 15 grains, which is extremely hard. In fact, the upper limit on the hard water scale is at 10.5 gains, so we're well into "hard" territory. For that he recommended a water softener.
The set-up would be as follows:
Install chlorinator to treat the raw water out of the well.
The water pumps into a galvanized 120 gal storage tank (already in the well-house)
The water oxidizes in the tank for 20-30min to separate the Iron and Sulfur
As that tank fills it will spill into another 120 gallon tank (which we would need to purchase). The goal is to have that water completely oxidized so we aren't pulling in any water that hasn't yet been treated.
The water will then go through a carbon filter to remove the oxidized Iron and Sulfur. That waste will be pumped onto the ground outside the well-house, unless we pipe it elsewhere.
After the carbon filter the water will go through the softener.
Then we can set up multiple pipes to feed the house and the creamery.
Sounds like it's something we can work with but there's still the question of whether the sulfur in the soil will come through the forage to taint the milk. A woman from the NRCS is going out this week to test the soil for us, so I guess we'll find out soon!
You sound like us... went to the city, had fancy jobs, now going back to the country
linuxboy - you're dead on
I'm from VT and my husband is from NM. Through different paths we both ended up in NYC with fancy jobs that we now are very much disillusioned with. When I was a kid in the woods, I craved glamour - now I'm a fashion designer who craves dirt and the woods. Ha!