Like the majority of people in New Hampshire I have a well, so of course the water is not chlorinated or in fact treated in any way. Yet hearing about infected water is rare. Of course, I would have to make an extreme effort to break into the well in order to accidentally infect it…
As for the water pipes being full so there’s no room for stagnation, they are full at all times, aren’t they? At least minor plumbing repairs have lead me to believe that the off position of a faucet is blocking the exodus of water that is always there waiting. Well, at least until there’s a power failure and the pumps in the well go off.
As a side note, my neighbor worked for the water utility in town, and he said they throttled the output of the treatment plant so the water towers would drain down during the day, and fill back up at night.
Depending on the source of water, it has dissolved and suspended solids (minerals) in them. If your water supply is from a fresh water lake which in turn is fed by melting snow, you’ll have less suspended solids and consequently less precipitation (scaling) in your water pipes. If your water supply is from a deep well (aquifer) it has a lot of suspended and dissolved solids (aka hard water).
Scaling deposits have an inverse relationship with temperature , that is their solubility decrease when the temperature rises. Hence a lot of groundwater, which is cold leaves deposits (scales) when it is taken out and pumped and the temperature rises due to atmospheric conditions.
These minerals or solids are usually not harmful to your health in the natural concentrations (some deep aquifers do have high concentration of magnesium that will give you instant diarrhea) and water treatment plants have some leeway to leave them in.
Those mineral deposits can also act as a protective barrier between the water and the pipes, acting as a corrosion inhibitor that prevents metal leaching. I don’t know how well natural lime/calcium minerals do compared to the deliberate addition of orthophosphate (phosphoric acid) which is used in municipal water systems, but it’s the same principle.
It’s the transmission that is aerobic. The bacteria grow in stagnant water and get spread around in water droplets. A/C systems are specially good at this, but showers and even the spray from a tap works pretty well.
I remember talking to a city councilor for a small municipality once. They had a cruddy old trailer court (mobile homes, that is) that was built decades ago and they had to initiate a project to replace the water and sewer lines. (Which of course meant a major assessment for the residents). He mentioned that the water supply had initially been hooked up to the city water at two spots to create a “U” shaped water-main. In normal water feed, it’s a tree shape, so any crud or debris that gets past treatment washes out of the system with use. With a U shape, crud could wash back and forth in the main pipe depending on consumption rates and become very unhealthy.
(Also, if there are minor leaks in the system, which happens from time to time… when water is turned off temporarily for whatever reason, there’s no pressure and outside dirt debris could back leak into the pipes)
We had steel pipe in our house. I replaced about 80-85% of the steel plumbing with copper. As others have said, steel rusts from the inside. The buildup can restrict the flow by essentially making the pipes narrower over time.
The pipe I removed from our house (built in '56, I replaced early 2000s) was corroded so that some sections were blocked by rust buildup by more than 50%, particularly in the elbows. Water pressure/flow improved considerably after I switched over to new pipe.
My limited experience many years ago was that all the water mains around me were connected at both ends where ever possible. By valves, one of which had a left-hand thread and was always left ‘off’, the other with a standard thread and always ‘on’. This allowed my boss to bypass broken sections, and the odd thread valves meant that all valves were always returned to the same position.
My limited experience many years ago was that all the water mains around me were connected at both ends where ever possible. By valves, one of which had a left-hand thread and was always left ‘off’, the other with a standard thread and always ‘on’. This allowed my boss to bypass broken sections, and the odd thread valves meant that all valves were always returned to the same position.
The problem with this is of course, you have a giant “dead end” stub where the same problem exists - long term accumulation of crud and debris that can grow unhealthy contaminants. I assume in modern times this could be resolved by electronically controlled valves that could be automatically cycled on a regular basis to change the feed and ensure there was no long term stagnant water supply branches.
My trip to the office every day takes my across municipal lines. Just before the first office building outside the city I see a crew about once a week flushing water out of the hydrant at the end of the line.
Is this the same thing as ‘jetting the pipes’? My town jets the pipes a couple of times a year and if you don’t have the toilet lids down you come home to water over the bathroom floors. This backing up of the water through the toilet doesn’t seem possible to me, but there I am with water over the floor. Anyway, we get notices from the town of when it’s going to happen-so “down lids!”
“jetting the pipes” is different from flushing drinking water lines (though kind of the same idea). Jetting deals with the. uh, post-consumer water pipes, which are zero-pressure gravity driven for the most part. So to clean out accumulated grease and wipes and really solid poos you have to open a manhole, stick in a hose with a powerful nozzle, and use the spray jet to flush things out. I’m guessing that as the spray goes down the sewer pipe, it also hits the side connections to individual houses, pushing some pressure backwards towards the house.