We’re on a well. Been in this home for three years. Never had a problem with smelly water before.
About three months ago, we had a new water softener installed.
About three weeks ago, we had a new water heater installed.
The middle of last week we noticed a rotten egg smell during showers. Now we notice it at all sinks. We’ve also got about five seconds of black sediment when we first turn on the water in the tub or bathroom sink, but only once in a while (happens somewhere between every three to 12 uses). This only happens when we turn on the hot water faucet.
Kitchen sink isn’t on the softener, but still has the smell, so it has nothing to do with the softener, and everything to do with the water heater, I reckon.
But what the heck could be causing a water heater to do this to our water? I’ve done a little poking around on the Interwebs, but am not finding anything that makes sense. Anyone here have any ideas?
Can be an (unfortunate) consequence of a new system when the installation stirs up stuff which has been settled for years. It will improve and the link below gives some treatments.
Your installer should be able to give you advice.
Our sulfur situation was different than yours, but I’m adding this for future Dopers who might search the subject and find your thread.
boytyperanma is the patron saint of water issues. If you’re looking through lots of threads, search on his name. (There are others that are also helpful; no disrespect intended towards those who have chimed in to help in the past.)
Air injection works extremely ‘well’ for us. Our well water has a lot of elemental sulfur in it. Before treatment it was undrinkable and depending on the season, almost unshowerable. No ill effects per se, and if we let tap water sit in a pitcher for a while the scent went away, but it was miserable living.
We did a ton of research, testing and asking around (see point 1) and found that there were three main approaches (there may be more now or more than I’m remembering), a couple chemical options (chlorine and managnese greensand I think) and air injection. It wasn’t a clear-cut choice, but we gambled on the Water-Right Impression air injection system due to lack of chemicals and lower maintenance (air system takes air from the environment).
The system was a dream come true fifteen minutes after installation. The smell was completely gone, without a trace, never to come back. System is self-sustaining and user-maintenance free, regenerating itself in the middle of the night. Install cost was around two grand, and we spent another grand or so about twelve years later to ‘rebed’ it. Worth every penny.
I don’t have anything to compare them to in terms of water solutions, but Water-Right is a fantastic company. Though they sell to installers and distributors, they never hesitated to cheerfully give us extensive tech support and advice when we had other well-related issues (e.g. our well pump was failing and in diagnosing that I was trying to isolate different systems).
YMMV; I don’t know what situations would call for a different solution.
This can be a problem with anaerobic bacteria. The bacteria reacts with the sacrificial anode in your water heater, producing hydrogen sulfide gas, which makes that rotten egg smell. Although I personally haven’t experienced it, some say that using a water softener makes things worse, which seems to fit with your symptoms. It’s also more likely to occur on well water, like your system, though it can occur on city water systems as well, especially if your house is on the far end of the system and the water’s chlorine levels are a bit low.
Again, I haven’t personally tried this, but supposedly replacing the anode in the water heater can fix the problem. Some sources say that you need the new sacrificial anode to be a combination aluminum/zinc anode as any other type (including just plain aluminum or magnesium) won’t fix the problem and you’ll still have the smell.
One way to test this is to dump a bunch of hydrogen peroxide into your water heater, let it sit for a few hours, then flush the system to get rid of the peroxide. If this gets rid of the smell for a few weeks, then you’ve definitely got bacteria in your water heater causing the smell. Some people recommend using bleach. I think either one works. Sometimes you can get lucky and the peroxide or bleach will kill all of the bacteria, but it’s usually only a temporary fix, if it works. Often the bacteria comes from the well and breeds in the hot water tank, and since you aren’t killing the bacteria in the well, it’s only a matter of time before they breed enough in the tank to start producing enough hydrogen sulfide gas to be noticeable again.
I don’t know if heating the water to a higher temperature (as suggested by boytyperanma) is effective or not. I have no idea what temperature it takes to kill this type of bacteria. Peroxide and bleach are the only two methods that I have heard of.
They do make water heaters that don’t have a sacrificial anode in them, though since you just purchased a water heater you probably don’t want to purchase another one. For the benefit of others coming into this thread that may have an older heater that needs to be replaced anyway, they do make plastic-lined heaters and tankless heaters that heat the water on-demand.
I recently had this issue with the windscreen washer on my car. Horrendous smell when using it, which I assumed was probably bacteria. My fix so far has been to completely empty the well and wait a few days for it to (hopefully) completely dry out. When I refill it, I may add a bit of bleach to try and kill off any lingering bacteria. Hopefully this will work.
Strangely curious how you propose to Empty and then Dry Out a subterranean well
and what you are refilling it with, for if it does not fill on it’s own, it is not a well but a cistern more or less.
We used to notice this on our dishes after they came out of the dishwasher. I spent days googling and never did get a definitive answer. I washed dishes by hand for several months and now the problem is intermittent but I still notice it faintly sometimes. Good luck!
Just another vote for air injection. It made all the difference in the world with our well water. We use the air injection, a water softener, and a dual-cartridge (two standard string cartridges stacked on top of each other) filter and the water is great!
Some anode rods react poorly with some water, it is an occasional issue when softening water.
Water heater manufacturers offer anode rods in at least 2 different materials, partly for this particular reason, if the water heater has a aluminum rod, changing it to a magnesium rod or vs versa may resolve the issue.
As the OP’s issue didn’t exist previously I’d be hesitant to jump to additional treatment methods. Naturally occurring sulfur would have made the water smell prior to changing the water heater or adding the softener. It’s possible to water has changed but that would be an unlikely coincidence. Best to try some low cost experiments like raising the temperature and changing the anode rod before moving to something like air injection.
I’ve raised the temp this morning, so we’ll see how that goes. Thanks for the input, and I will likely be back for more advice in the days ahead.
I won’t use chlorine bleach to kill the bacteria as we’re on a septic system. If the increased heat doesn’t work, I’ll perhaps give the hydrogen peroxide thing a go. Is this something that should be done professionally, or at least by someone who has an ounce of knowledge of such things? I’m a complete ignoramus when it comes to plumbing/natural gas, and don’t want to blow myself to smithereens, and some of the stuff I’ve read online has me turning things off and on and re-lighting and whatnot. Some places have even said use a professional, while others make it sound totally DIY. To be honest, I don’t even know where I’d pour something into the tank. It all looks sealed up to me. But again, I’m an ignoramus.
I wouldn’t worry too much about using bleach. I personally chlorinate 50-100 wells a year which includes chlorinating all the pipes throughout the house. A majority of the chlorinated water is flushed off the pressure tank and outside spigots but a fair amount does make it into the septic, including the volume of the water heater. I’ve yet to kill a septic system. The naturally low pH in our aquifers make chlorine the preferred method. hydrogen peroxide works too, but I prefer chlorine, it’s had better results in my experience.
The water heater is pressurized, so adding stuff to it is a little more complex than just pouring stuff in. You’d shut the valve to it off, drain the pressure off, unscrew a plug or relief valve from a top port, drain some water off with the bottom drain, poor peroxide or bleach into the top, put the top plug back in and re-pressurize it. If the water heater has any age too it even I avoid playing with them.
The method I more commonly use to introduce bleach to household pipes or water heaters, is I bring a cartridge housing with hose connections. I fill it with bleach, shut off the main shut off, connect one hose to the pressure tank spigot to the cartridge housing, one to whichever other spigot is convenient off the other side of the cartridge housing. The path of the water is then through the housing, so I can run bleach anywhere I need too.
Chlorinating inside the house has the advantage I can limit the chlorine to impacted areas without taking out the whole water supply, however my usual recommendation with chlorinating is introduce it through the well and chlorinate everything. Let it sit a day and flush it all afterwords. Increased contact time and getting every pipe is a more reliable method of killing all bacteria. If you skip pipes bacteria may grow back from un-chlorinated areas.
I don’t think it’s a problem with the water heater. I think the sulfur smell just releases from the water when it’s heated.
Try taking a pot of cold tap water from the kitchen sink and heating it on the stove to see if it still smells.
Growing up we had well water and the sulfur smell came and went off and on for weeks, months, or years at a time. My dad always assumed that since we were drawing from the underground water table stuff was constantly shifting around down there and the underground sulfur deposits came and went with how the water was flowing underground.
Sorry, I wasn’t proposing that as a suggestion for the OP - I was explaining what I was doing with a seemingly related problem with my car. Apologies for the confusing hijack.
After 30 years of delicious well water, sulfur nastiness came and has stayed. We now have a filtration system (which hardens the water?), a water softener (to address the hardness), and biannual bleaching of the well. Our three neighbors are similarly affected and have tried various remedies with varying results.
