Cecil,
Another equipment thought might be useful to someone. We use off-the-shelf swimming pool sand filters in small treatment systems to remove iron and other precipitates. Cost effective and easily backwashed.
Dale
Absolutely! The ultimate would be to aerate via gravity from the well (have already done it via a packed column) with the minimum of 20 minutes retention time in some type of containment vessel before going into a swimming pool sand filter with mixed media. (Or mineral tank) Then no special expensive heavy media needed. Probably 2 filters to switch to the other when one is backwashing.
The trick is to have a vessel large enough to allow the 20 minutes before the ferric laden water reaches the filter. Or use an oxidzing media in the filter or a mix of oxidzing media and sand in the filter to speed things up to prevent an interruption in flow.
If I can cover my outdoor aquaculture well and system I already have an 8 X 8 X 3 feet deep EPDM lined pit where my packed column dropped into. I could probably double the length to reduce the number of times the well has to kick on and off.
It would be a simple matter of calculating retention time based on volume and flow rate to determine minimum pit size. And contrary to popular belief when flowing into a vessel you don't get 100 percent in and out of the old water. So there would be some lag of the ferric laden water which would be to my advantage. May add bunched up netting to the pit for iron to collect on to increase precipitation due to the the iron hydroxide promoting oxidation. But then may not have to.
I can squeeze down the flow of my 45 gpm well pump without doing any harm according to my well driller, but would still be using the same amount of energy which would be inefficient. The solution seems to be to set up a float valve to cut off power to the well when it reaches a certain level and turn it back on when it drops to a certain level. Have a friend that does this at his trout farm and he's a retired electrian so...
