Private water (Borehole) - water testing

[Kuro507]

For those of you who have a private water supply, what water quality testing do you do, and how often?

 

We plan on having a proper water quality test done once a year (I believe our local council offer this, for a price).

 

Currently we don't even have a water meter installed, so I have no concept of how much water we are consuming.

Idealy, I'd like to install a few sensors and have them send readings back to Home Assistant.

 

For example:

• Water consumption
• Water pressure (possibly either side of filtration system, to monitor for blockage/restrictions)
• Ph level (we need to adjust this as last test was acidic)
• Possibly temperature
• Water quality?

 

I know some of you have quite sophisticated filtration systems, what have/do you do?

[JohnMo]

Get it serviced once a year.

 

First couple of years we needed to replace the 10 and 5 micron every 3 months, it's now done once a year.

 

Had water analysis done in the first couple of years, now don't bother.

 

Why bother with pressure analysis, you get that every time you open the tap? Your fine filters are in clear filter housings are they white or mucky? Your pressure will change on a continuous basis as the accumulator pressure switch is activated based on a hysterisis.

 

Generally don't overthink it.

[Kelvin]

We had two analysis done one when it was first drilled and after it was commissioned and another 6 months later but haven’t since then. You can buy water test strips. I have a comprehensive kit of them so test it every month. We can measure water use and water pressure as we have a DAB pump that has a Home Assistant integration. The DAB pump alerted me to a leak a while back as it notified me that system pressure was falling and it was repressurising it periodically. Turned out to be a crack in the body of the external tap. 
 

The only other thing I’d have liked to have added to monitor is where the water level is in the borehole as that has changed from when it was first drilled and particularly during the long dry spell. We have water probes at different levels in the hole connected to the control panel at 10m, 20m, and 60m with the pump at 80m. After 9 months we had to rewire it to disable the probe at 10m as it kept setting the alarm off. The original water level was at 1.2m bgl so this has dropped several metres. 

[JohnMo]

59 minutes ago, Kelvin said:

We have water probes at different levels in the hole connected to the control panel at 10m, 20m, and 60m with the pump at 80m

So what will do if you hit 60m level, just fret but continue to use, you have no other options. So be blind to it and don't fret, is my view of these things. Happy to go with it, in ignorance. If a deep well runs dry we are all stuffed.

[Kelvin]

2 minutes ago, JohnMo said:

So what will do if you hit 60m level, just fret but continue to use, you have no other options. So be blind to it and don't fret, is my view of these things. Happy to go with it, in ignorance. If a deep well runs dry we are all stuffed.

If it hits 60m it will stop pumping. I agree, all the holes near us are deep (80m+)  and if they run dry it won’t just be us in trouble. I had that very conversation with my neighbour the other week and we agreed fretting wasn’t worth it. A week later I was chatting with a builder who has a 120m deep hole and it has run dry this summer for the first time in 10 years. It also wrecked his pump. 
 

Ref the probes. I didn’t know any better. I thought water probes at different levels connected to a control board were standard as the two quotes we got included them.  None of our neighbours have them and their pumps are a metre from the bottom of the hole. But then some of those boreholes were  put in by a guy that works on his own. 

[JohnMo]

7 minutes ago, Kelvin said:

their pumps are a metre from the bottom of the hole.

Mine is similar, started at 1m, but was dragging to much sand in so was lifted to 1.5m. We are only 34m down. Some people in Aberdeenshire have run dry this summer, but suspect they will be shallow ground water or hill run off capture.

[Kelvin]

Quite a few of the wells and hill water sources around us have dried up too. None of the boreholes have though. We sit in the Strathmore valley so has water running into it from everywhere so it’s not very likely we’ll have problems.  Our burn, which runs down into the valley,  also never stopped flowing but it was the lowest we’ve seen it. I reckon for as long as it runs with water our borehole should have water in it. 
 

My reason for wanting to measure it is to inform our water usage. We’ve got our water usage down below 100l per person recently. We have a water softener for example that uses a lot of water when it regenerates. I’ve switched it off during this dry spell. I don’t necessarily need to measure it to change our water usage of course. 

Edited Tuesday at 10:08 by Kelvin