Your neighbor might be suffering from a well-casing that is deteriorating (rusting) and dropping “shards” of rust down into the water-column…. While YOUR casing might be PVC… That may be one explanation for the differences.The bubbling air thing for iron is no joke. A neighbor has a water well with heavy iron taste to the point it is almost undrinkable. He has a 500g tank next to the well head and fills it full. Then he has an air pump that just bubbles air and lets it go as long as possible until water is needed then it gets pumped to a 1000g tank. From there it gets pumped at house pressure for use. There is only a hint of mineral taste and there is no filtration anywhere in the system. It's busy work but a guy has to do what he has to do.
Our place is 3/4 miles away, 750' higher. Our water is high mineral but no iron taste. In fact, the mineral content is what makes our water taste so darn good. And I believe is better, healthwise, that bazillion $ systems that remove most everything - almost like drinking distilled that has no flavor at all. When we have city visitors they comment on our water without fail. Makes good coffee too
I am on a well which was drilled circa 1950 like some South-Texas oil-well did it…. a simple hole-in-the-ground…. cased with a 12“ steel or iron pipe……. with a steel plate laid across it to hold up the pump-column…. The steel casing was rusting and dropping shards down the shaft, and the steel plate was allowing crickets to enter the well. I can’t believe the previous ranch-owners …(four families/houses on the well)… put up with that.
When I bought this place 32 years ago…. one of the first things done…was to pull the pump and install a proper sanitary well-head and build a well-house around it, adding new equipment and simple sediment filtration. That process involved sending new 8” PVC casing down the hole, with a gland on the lower end, then filling the space between the 12” iron casing and the 8” PVC casing…with cement…down to about the 20-ft level….
This sealed the well for sanitation…as well as locked-out that rusting original casing.
Now, the water is only treated by running it thru paper filters at the well-house…. and a string-filter at the house entrance…. giving us odorless, clear, taste-free water. (The only issue we have is hardness…as it is drilled down thru 500’ of limestone….. but that limestone is probably what filters and gives it such nice taste…. (maybe I should be distilling whiskey… the neighbors do, (Garrison Bros) and sell it for $150+ a bottle.)
Anyway… Re-casing the water well might clear up the iron problem if old casing is the cause.
