In years gone by, my father and I sold a number of cartridge-type filters to customers who had rusty water. After several years, we began to investigate other types of filters that would work on ferric or visible iron.
Looking at a water map of the U.S. recently, I noticed that most of the Great Lakes states — which include Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota, plus the non-Great Lakes state of Iowa — all have groundwater that is classified as very hard.
If you have read many of these columns, you know that water wells and pumps in Michigan are regulated by our Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ). Several years ago, the DEQ asked industry members to participate in what is called the Director’s Water Well Advisory Committee.
If a seminar on PFAS is held near you, dear reader, I suggest you attend. You will come away with more questions than answers, but also with much more knowledge about this widespread subject.
In last month’s column, I said I would be discussing iron filters this month. However, I realize I failed to cover one rather special type of softener and, also, how the regeneration cycles of automatic softeners are accomplished.
In my working years, I have seen many control valve designs — some pretty simple and some rather complicated. I’m going to write about the advantages and disadvantages of these designs.
My next columns will be about water conditioning. I am going to start with the most common contaminant issue that we have here in southeast Michigan: hardness.
Sadly, I must start this column with news that the groundwater industry in Michigan recently lost two good and longtime members: Robert Larson from L’Anse and Harry Kleiman from Iron Mountain.
