Someone privately messages me that he (jokingly) thought it would be easier to pickup a gallon of water at the local grocery store than go to the bother I have.
I thought it would be more fun to share my response.
We drive by a spring that people come from all over to fill their jugs. It's less than 2 miles from us.
It was a royal pain in the ass. The worst of it was waiting for the person in front of you filling 10 one gallon jugs. When we were lugging water, we used about 5 gallons every 2 days. That's just the two of us (and two small dogs). That was for drinking, cooking and brushing our teeth. That would come to about $1200 year and 900 plastic bottles from the grocery store.
You don't want any iron in your pipes, period. You don't want to brush your teeth with it, flush with it, wash cloths with it. And most of all not take a shower in it. Even at 1ppm it's just not as refreshing. It's tolerable, just a real nusance. Never mind drinking it, which is perfectly safe.
The primary purpose of the filters is to remove the Iron. The water is near perfect accept for Iron. pH is like 7.2 and hardness is low. Part of the reason I didn't want reverse osmosis or a water softener because it would screw that up.
The expensive filters I'm using are $100 each. And the cheap filters are $5 each.
My guess is I'll use about 3 cheap filters a year and 1 each of the expensive filters every 2 years. We also have an ultra ultra filter under the kitchen sink that is $40 for 19,000 gallons.
6 * $5 + 2 * $100 + $40 to filter about 40,000 gallons.
That's less than 1 penny per gallon.
It would probably cost more for salt in a water softener (which is bad for the lakes BTW).
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