Water, water, everywhere

When I work in urban and suburban areas, I rarely see a set-up like this. When I am in more rural places, I see them. Do you know what they are and what they do?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When I am closer into the city, I usually see this same problem solved with something like this.  I saw these in Woburn. Does that help you guess?

 

If you still don’t know, that is a whole-house water treatment system. It is commonly used for houses that get their water service from well water. A house with a private well will have one. I don’t usually see them in houses that have a municipal water supply.

Most of the towns around Boston depend on Massachusetts Water Resources Authority to supply their water and sewage needs. That water comes from the Quabbin Reservoir in the western part of the Commonwealth. The problems that MWRA water users tend to experience are about “hard water,” lead in the water, or occasional reports of bacteria or parasites found during testing. That is what brings people to install the small whole-house filters or kitchen sink filters that I see most often. Culligan, maker of these filters, had this information on their website for our area: for Boston, for Newton.

The house with the whole-house filtration was on municipal water supply in Woburn. For the most part, Woburn’s reputation for water issues is old news, made famous by the book and movie A Civil Action about water pollution and a civil lawsuit in the 1970s in this town. But some people do not trust municipal authority to assure clean water.

Would you add a system like this? The Center for Disease Control (CDC) recommends systems for households who want one or more of these outcomes: Remove specific contaminants, take extra precautions because a household member has a compromised immune system, and/or improve the taste of drinking water.