ECOsmarte blog

I'm excited about a well water system being installed in Upper Ojai, a beautiful area between Ojai and Santa Paula in Ventura County, California. The owner has dealt with water that smells like rotten eggs and causes black stains ever since she purchased the home. Not hard to figure out that the rotten egg smell was hydrogen sulfide; the home is very close to the hot springs in that area. The black stains turned out to be manganese. The owner was actually taking her laundry to a friend's house rather than risk stains - that's how bad it has been...

Ok, so sue me, I'm in a snit about brine discharge again. I found this article about another town considering a ban on salt water softeners. Dixon, to be specific. I admit I did not know exactly where Dixon is, but was quickly informed by Wikipedia that it is a town in Solano County, 23 miles north of Sacramento, California. Population a mere 16K. Sounds nice.

What is not nice is what's happening with their treated sewer water...

Here's another one of those -"Uh Oh, Hmmm, salt seems to be a problem here.." articles. This one is from Texas, in a paper called the Community Impact Newspaper, which serves 8 communities in the central Texas area, north of Austin.

The article states that the water source changed for many residents and the new source is not as hard. Now residents need to be told to dial down the amount of salt spewed out from their water softeners, because the TDS (total dissolved solids) content of the water released back into the Colorado River is too high. For TDS read sodium, potassium and chloride - all 3 involved in water softening.

I take trips up to Santa Barbara and Carpinteria periodically, both for work and for pleasure. Last year sometime I recall spotting a news item in a local paper about water quality problems in Carpinteria. Here's the water quality report that details it. This was a serious problem that actually necessitated mailing notices to all residents in February of 2006, notifying them that the Carpinteria Valley Water District had been in violation of recently changed state water standards for the last quarter of 2005...