My water is slightly acidic and has a lot of iron & manganese. A 2012 lab report shows a PH of 6.7, 9.09 mg/L of iron and 0.50 mg/L of manganese. A salesman from the pump company was out last week. He confirmed the PH figure, and said I have 10 grains of iron, of which 3 grains is dissolved (so I assume 7 grains is particulate).

Right now I have a 13"x54" calcite filter, followed by a 16 gpm cartridge filter and then a 10"x54" 48,000 grain water softener. Further down the line, there's an old cartridge filter, in which I've put a 10gpm carbon filter. The carbon filter isn't absolutely necessary, but the water tastes a bit better with it, and it also removes a rotten egg odor that we sometimes get in the water as well.

Overall, the filtering system works well, but I understand (from some posts I made last spring) that I'm relying too much on the softener for iron removal, which can cause premature resin failure. Other than that, it would be nice to get a bit more water flow in the house (I have a 15 gpm pump, but get maybe 6-7 gpm in the house). I understand that the calcite filter is probably the culprit here. Finally, there are occasional problems with metallic water getting into the lines when water gets used late at night when one of the filters is backwashing (flushing a toilet, icemaker, daughter gets a vomiting bug, etc.). So it would also be nice to put in a system which would prevent this from happening.

In any event, the current system needs some repairs (brine tank leaking, calcite bleeding into the cartridge filter), so I thought it would be a good time to make some other changes as well. A salesman from the filtration company came out last week, and he noted that the cartridge filters look remarkably clean given the amount of iron in the water. So he thinks the calcite & softener are doing a very good job (although the calcite needs to be rebedded and have the d-ring replaced likely due to clogging with iron).

The salesman's recommendation was to convert the softener to a twin tank design, so metallic water doesn't bleed through late at night. This didn't make much sense to me, as I would still be putting a lot of stress on the softener resin. Instead, I argued that a separate iron filter would make a lot more sense. First it would reduce the load on the softener resin, and, as long as no two filters were backwashing at the same time, metallic water wouldn't be able to get through as well.

After a bit of discussion, he agreed with this approach. I asked about Filox, but they don't carry it. Their 2 most popular iron media are Birm and Katalox. He recommended Katalox, but said to be prepared for the fact that there's a break-in period for the Katalox, during which the PH will be significantly elevated (to around 10.5). He said there's no significant health risk with this, but the water might feel slippery and have an off taste. After that, he said the Katalox would raise the PH a bit for several months and then stop affecting the PH completely. He also said that the Katalox would get rid of the hydrogen sulfide, which is causing the rotten egg odor.

The sales rep sent me a proposal today to install a 13"x54" Katalox filter with a Fleck 2510 controller. The filter order would be Katalox (one outside spigot plumbed in after this)-calcite-cartridge-softener. I could keep the downstream carbon filter if necessary, or bypass it if it doesn't do much good. Overall, there's room for 4 tanks, so I could put a second calcite filter in parallel to the first, but I would need to scrap the first cartridge filter.

So my principal questions are whether Katalox is a good substitute for Filox, and whether this filtration setup makes sense. Aside from this, I also have a few other questions:

- Is the water from the Katalox filter safe to drink/shower in during the break-in period?

- Is it true that the Katalox initially raises the PH, but then stops affecting it? If it permanently raises the PH, then maybe we won't need the calcite or softener at all (hardness of the raw water is 52 mg/L)?

- The first cartridge filter is currently useful in that it stops any calcite that bleeds out of the filter and alerts me to the fact that there's a problem. If I were to replace this with a second calcite filter (to improve water flow), what would happen if a d-ring failed again and started to bleed calcite into the softener?

- Although the softened water tastes fine as is, it might be nice to have a source of non-softened water for drinking, watering plants, etc. Unfortunately though, there's no good location to put a RO unit, and I'm also loathe to have a hole drilled through our new granite countertops (I should have thought about this before we had the kitchen renovated). In lieu of an RO unit, I was thinking it might make sense to replumb one of the kitchen sinks with a line coming in from a spot right before the softener. Does this make sense?

Thanks for your help.