I am interested in purchasing a property (Lake County, CA) and I had a
water analysis done. The test came back with 3.4mg/L of Boron. Now, it might not have been the most accurate of tests, since there was no pump in the well and it had been all clogged up with slime bacteria and not used for several months. The water was basically black sludge.
It's a 340 ft well. To get the water, the well guy lowered a bailer
bucket down probably six times, just pulling out about 60 gallons total, tossing it aside, and then finally using some of the remaining water down in the well for water analysis purposes. The water was still all cloudy and mucky. But it's all I had to work with. There was no pump in the well and it was all clogged up anyway.
Obviously the water would be clearer if it ran for awhile and the iron/manganese/whatever bacteria was cleared out. That is another issue in itself. In the water analysis, the measurements of hardness and minerals and metals was all off-the-charts high, which is to be expected. But does boron correlate to iron bacteria concentration? When there's a lot of slime bacteria, is there also an increase in boron? Would that stay independent, slime or no slime?
And regardless, what am I to make of having boron in well water? I would prefer having zero. Above 1mg/L is satisfactory only for semi-tolerant crops. And I don't want to drink the stuff. What I have learned is that RO is generally effective for removing about half of the boron level, and that would leave me with still too much (if the test was reliable, and I don't know that either yet).
Ideas for purification? Ideas on boron in water? Slime bacteria?
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