Things that color our water (and not in a good way...)

At Lunt Marymor, we’ve performed thousands of house calls on your plumbing, and like your family doctor, our training and experience allows us to quickly identify common causes for common ailments. This brief article outlines a few of the common symptoms, causes and solutions for problems with water quality in the home.

Throughout most of the Bay Area we drink high quality, Sierra snow melt water. It’s clear, it’s cold, it’s clean, and tastes bright. It’s delivered from the mountains to our communities through an amazing web of canals and tunnels, pipes and pumps. The water is stored locally in reservoirs, chemically treated for health and safety, and delivered to our homes via gravity flow or booster pumps through a vast network of under ground utility pipes. Water from the utility company arrives at our property where it is metered, allowing the utility company to measure how much water we use, and to bill us according to pre-established water rates. Sometimes, things get into our water supply, through the distribution piping, or from degrading plumbing fixtures and appliances in our homes. When that happens, we might discover that the color of the water has changed, or we find particles in the water, signaling that it’s time for some investigation and repair.

Black Goo: Some years ago, our local water districts switched from treating our drinking water supply with chlorine to a related compound called chloramine. It didn’t take long to discover that chloramine will actively attack all of the black rubber products in the plumbing system. These include things like the black rubber washers that seal the tank to bowl connection in your toilet, the black rubber flappers and tank balls that are part of the flushing mechanism in the toilet tank, black rubber gaskets in plumbing union fittings, and other similar black rubber products. The chloramines begins to degrade the rubber into a soft gooey mess that will come off on your hands if you touch it, and will slough off into the water. The fix? Locate and replace the black rubber products in your plumbing system with the newer related rubbers that are often red, blue, yellow or clear in color.

White Chalky Stuff: The common storage-tank hot water heater is a fairly simple, largely passive device typically consisting of a glass-lined steel storage tank with a burner in a burn chamber, a gas regulator valve, a vent for combusted gases, a temperature and pressure relief valve, and connections for hot and cold water and gas pipes. A thermostat maintains the water temperature at a preset point, usually 120-125 degrees. The manufacturer has provided a plastic “dip tube” to deliver the cold water from the inlet at the top of the tank, to the bottom of the tank where it is heated. Because hot water is lighter than cold water (just like hot air rising), the heated water will rise and stratify, sitting at the top of the tank, where it is drawn off when needed. In recent years, the plumbing industry suffered from a huge batch of defective plastic dip tubes. They were made of white plastic from a bad plastic compound and were found to degrade over time. The white plastic tube literally falls apart in the hot water heater leaving a chalky white residue that can get drawn out of the hot water heater and clog the faucet aerators at all of the sinks. Many owners of hot water heaters with this defect participated in a manufacturers’ recall and received some compensation for the problem, but unfortunately, the recall period has now ended. The fix? When white chalky stuff starts showing up in faucet aerators, look first to removing and replacing the hot water heater dip tube. The water heater should be drained and the hot water system should be thoroughly flushed clean of all white particulate. A broken dip tub can also cause a drop in hot water temperature at the tap, because the cold water that was being delivered to the bottom of the heater tank is now mixing with the stored hot water at the top of the tank – so replacing the dip tube will solve two problems at once.

Brown Water and Grit: Many older homes in the Bay Area are piped with their original galvanized steel water lines. Over time, the interior bore of a steel water line begins to rust and calcify. In extreme cases, the interior of the pipe will become so clogged with rust and calcium deposits that the water volume flowing through the pipe will begin to diminish. The pipe wall can wear so thin that pinhole leaks will rust through. In the Bay Area, the average expected life for a galvanized steel water line is fifty to seventy-five years. The main water supply buried in the yard will likely have a shorter life span because it is rusting from the inside out, but also because it is in contact with wet soil, it is rusting from the outside in. The most common symptoms seen in older homes with galvanized water lines are, pin hole leaks, loss of water volume, brown water and grit accumulation in the faucet aerators. The fix? Remove and rinse faucet aerators as needed. Leaking sections of pipe must be replaced immediately. Sometimes cold water can be “back flushed” through the hot water line to purge accumulated rust and grit. Ultimately, all old galvanized steel water systems must be replaced – usually with new copper pipe.

Green Slimy Stuff: A more localized problem, seen commonly in certain neighborhoods in San Francisco where municipal water is still stored in old redwood lined storage tanks, is the problem of green slime in the water. Although benign, green algae does grow in these tanks and can get drawn out and end up in your faucets – yuk! The fix: Install a whole house solid core charcoal water filtration system. Water filtration can be designed to remove offending odors, particulates and chloramine. The filter system must be design to match to water volume demand of the house and the correct filter must be selected to address specific water quality issues.