Podcast Q & A 3: “We recently had a water softener installed, now we’re having a problem with blue stains. The company that installed the softener tested our water and it is not acid.
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This is Q and A episode 3
Hi, my name is Gerry Bulfin. I’m a WQA-certified master Water Specialist and water contractor here in Santa Cruz, California, Northern California. I go deeper into various well water treatment systems and problems each week on our main podcast, but I’m trying to do more of these quick Q&A episodes. We get so many questions daily, and people email, call, and chat with us through our website, so there are always great questions.
This week, John contacted us and said, “We recently had a water softener installed, and now we’re having a problem with blue stains. The company that installed the softener tested our water, and it is not acidic. They said it was not their fault and that they could not help. Have you ever heard of this happening?”
Well, John, yes, we have done it quite a few times. Let me talk about where the blue stains come from. You probably already know this, but blue staining inside, like the blue stains you see on your fixtures, bathtub, or laundry, is a result of copper corrosion. So your house, no doubt, has copper pipes. If you see blue stains, something is corroding the copper pipe. Most of our customers that have problems with blue stains have acidic well water.
So that’s a good reason to check the water and make sure it’s not acidic. If the water is acidic, usually, we find that corrosive water that is acidic is not that hard. Therefore, it’s aggressive water, and you have a problem with copper corrosion, and you get blue stains. The answer is to fix the acidity using our calcite neutralizer, fresh marble, or calcium carbonate.
But you got a water softener installed because your water is hard. It already has a lot of calcium carbonate, but they checked it, and it’s not acidic. So how can it be happening, then? Well, it’s hard to say for sure, but the most common cause is a plumbing problem. Essentially, what happens is that when the plumbing and the copper pipes are installed, they don’t deburr the ends of the copper pipes correctly.
They leave little jagged sections where the pipe hasn’t been properly deburred and prepared before they solder it or sweep the pipe together. Sometimes, they can use too much acid flux, which is not that common anymore but can happen. Some plumbers like the acid flex, but they use too much of it, or they don’t deburr the ends, and then you get these little corrosion sites occurring inside the copper pipe. It can be a big problem, and there is really nothing you can do except replace the copper pipe.
Unfortunately, you have to trace it back to that section of the copper pipe that was done around the water softener. Then you’d have to remove the copper pipe, inspect it, and maybe have a different plumber put it in or have them come back, examine it, and redo the piping so it’s properly deburred and there’s not too much flex.
The other way to do it is to see if you can eliminate the copper pipe and use stainless steel flex lines if it's a very short section of copper pipe that was installed. But this can be a serious problem, and I know here in the Bay area, we're about an hour south of San Francisco, there’s been a problem with excess copper levels floating into the Bay, and a lot of it is from improper plumbing practices because the water is naturally corrosive. So there have been different alerts and recommendations to be careful when you’re doing the piping to avoid this issue with copper.
Another myth that folks often think about is softeners. They think they remove the calcium carbonate and hardness, so now the softener makes the water aggressive or corrosive. In fact, that’s not true. If you have hard water and a neutral pH, meaning it’s not acidic, softening the water is not going to make the water aggressive or corrosive. That’s my experience of what we know.
Anyway, I hope that’s helpful. It’s bad news, but I don’t want to get in the middle of it with your contractor plumber. That’s what I will suggest. You can tell him that it wasn’t there before they did the softener, but now they’ve done it. You got the blue stains, and yeah, it’s a problem. It’s most likely the piping and the way it was done. It could be inferior piping in very rare circumstances, but I haven’t run into that myself. I’ve heard of it, but there are other problems with the jagged ends, such as not deburring, not preparing the copper pipe properly, and/or using too much flex, which can cause the problem.
Okay, well, if you have a question, please contact us through our website, cleanwaterstore.com. There’s a little chat box on there, where you can ask a question, or you can just do it the old-fashioned way: give us a call. We’re happy to talk to you about any kind of water issue, problem, or question you might have. Thanks again for listening.
USGS – Hardness of Water
https://www.usgs.gov/special-topic/water-science-school/science/hardness-water
Explains hard water and its relationship to calcium carbonate and water treatment.
