Water quality ...

[stevea]

Well I'm looking for a location for a startup, and one local community is very interested but their water ....

Their water source is a series of wells. The wells produce very hard water with a lot of iron (530ppb) - so they treat it and get the iron down to 0.010 ppm (10 ppb) which appears pretty good. Now for a strange twist - instead of liming the water to reduce hardness - they use an ion exchange filtration for the entire city water supply. It's like a household water softener. Never heard of a city doing that before,

As a result the tap water has ~185ppm of sodium (no potassium) !!

[total hardness ~188ppm as CaCO3 ,still hard]

That sodium would be a show-stopper for brewing beer, but AFAIK the beer problem is that sodium and sulfates together produce a a harsh flavor, and I expect that won't make it thru the still.

Should I move on and remove this city from my list ? (most of the region has 10-30ppm of sodium in their supplies, low iron and moderately hard).

Alternatively can someone point me to a resource on some larger scale RO water gear or the extra costs for RO treating water ?