I listen to a radio program every Saturday morning hosted by a realtor about home related issues with a guest who is an expert on each topic. Today's was wells and issues concerned with them. When I was looking for a home, I would have liked to live in the boonies but well water concerned me since I had zero experience. Fixing issues can get expensive and potential issues can crop up even if all is well at the moment.
We had well water for many years at my parents’ home. It had a lot of iron and sulfur but the little pump house had an aeration sprayer over a sandpit and it did a good job removing the sulfur. We’d have to periodically chip off a top crust of minerals on the sand and put in new sand but our water always tested very well, at least for the things they monitored at that time. You could taste the iron but got used to it. Here we have city water and I don’t like the taste. We use an under sink R.O. system to remove all the junk and it has a final mineral cartridge to add a bit of flavor back in. We use it for all drinking and cooking.
In my parents’ house, I grew up drinking, cooking, and bathing with cistern water. We had a water pump on a covered porch so we didn't have to go out into the elements to get buckets of water. Like @Thomas Windom, my husband and I hated the taste of our city water and put in a Reverse Osmosis system. We bought the cartages that remove everything. The water tastes so pure and refreshingly good!
I'm on a well. My water is pretty hard, so I installed a salt-based softener. It's very efficient. I have 18mg of salt per liter in my well water, and the softener adds 73mg for a total of 91mg per liter. That's about 360mg/gallon. You should have no more than 1,500mg-2,300mg/day. My water is much harder than most in the county (according to a seminar I sat in), but there are others who have an iron problem, which takes a lot of salt to remediate. I hated my municipal water back home. They put so much chlorine in it that it made your eyes sting in the shower. The downside to a well is that there can be repairs & maintenance. I've already replaced by pressure tank. Plus you have a septic system to deal with. I'm on some acreage here down in the hollow, with a spring-fed creek that goes around my property. My neighbors grew up on this land, and used to haul water up the hill from the spring when they were boys. Their dad eventually had a well drilled.
City water for the last 50 years. I don't even notice the chlorine. Pumps are too much trouble. It seems you have to be lucky to get perfect water. Then treatment is another hassle. I grew up on well water. First dentist appointment after I left home, the dentist said, you must have grown up on well water (without fluoride). So many cavities.
We are stuck with city water here, so we use water filters. We have one that Bobby put inline at the kitchen sink, and the refrigerator has one for the ice cubes. When we lived in Idaho and had the restaurant, we had fresh well water, and it was SO delicious ! A lot of people up there lived out in the sticks and had to haul water, so we always had people coming by to get their drinking water from us, and we were glad to share with them.
I've always had a ton of cavities and never had well water until I moved here. But I have no idea when fluoridation in my places of residence began. And in some (many?) regions, fluoride occurs naturally in the well water. >My well water fluoride concentration is 0.25 parts-per-million (ppm) >The range at which benefits are seen is 0.7 ppm to 1.2 ppm >The maximum we can safely consume (per the Fed) is 2.0 ppm I doubt that most of us reading this had fluoridated water until we were into our adult years. Ken may be the exception, since test programs were launched in some Michigan cities in the mid 1940s. Here are a few stats I dug up. Keep in mind that fluoridation programs were rolled out first in highly populated cities. -In 1954, 12% of the US population "had access to" fluoridated tap water. -In 1965, 18% of the US population "had access to" fluoridated tap water. -In 1970, 44% of the US population "had access to" fluoridated tap water. -In 1980, 50% of the US population "had access to" fluoridated tap water. -In 2012, 67% of the US population "had access to" fluoridated tap water. -The 2030 goal per the US Dept of Health & Human Services is 77%. --Today, 85% of Americans are not on wells. So for the folks on this senior's forum, the overwhelming odds are that we did not have fluoridated water growing up, or even into our adult years. By the time I hit 26 in 1980, odds were only 50/50 that a given person's water was fluoridated.
Fluoride is generally considered good for growing children, as it hardens teeth and bones, but considered bad for seniors as it makes bones brittles and thus more subject to fracture, especially hip fractures. You can also get fluoride supplements if you want them, and of course fluoride toothpaste is available. I have always questioned the efficacy of sodium fluoride as a topical though.
When I was a kid, I had a lot of cavities and was on well water. My mom bought Crest toothpaste for flouride. But the cavities mostly came from the fact that I was a kid and didn't brush my teeth. As an adult I had two cavities in 40 years and no gingivitis. I brushed and flossed. I was on well water most of that time. I worry about hexavalent flouride since the movie Erin Brochovich. I knew someone who claimed the flouride added to US water was waste that they did not know what to do with. I have always distilled our water. Takes out a lot of stuff. Softener salt is bad for hubby's blood pressure.
Upon further review of the officials, there is no evidence that fluoridating the water reduces cavities. The early studies didn’t take into account the subsequent widespread use of fluoride-containing toothpastes and other dental fluoride supplements, which also prevent cavities. This may explain why countries that do not fluoridate their water have also seen big drops in cavity rates. Link to article.