Embarrassed by your musty or rotten egg smelling water?

Water which smells musty or like rotten eggs is off-putting and often embarrassing for homeowners. Here you’ll find a quick guide on causes so you can confidently identify your smelly water problem.

Determining if your water has a sulfur problem is almost always made through observation (smell and sight) since available testing must be done on site with sophisticated equipment. Often, we’ll ask customers to find a spigot as close as possible to the water source, draw some water into a clear glass and look for two indicators. Does the water have the smell? Does the water appear opaque then clear up with time as if there were tiny bubble in it? The fact you smell the rotten egg odor is as good as any test to tell us it is present, and treatment is necessary. Most common comparisons for smell are propane gas, rotten eggs, or geothermal vents like geysers.

That nasty smelling rotten egg odor is often a result of bacteria producing hydrogen sulfide gas. Even minute amounts of H2S can be enough to ruin your otherwise perfect water and may be strong enough you can't even take a shower or be in the same room as running water.

If you’ve got H2S it must be treated, or it will cause other water treatment to fail as it coats filter media preventing the media from working as designed. If you want to see the full advantage of other water treatment you will have to treat the H2S problem.

Our ICS-H is a very good treatment for hydrogen sulfide.