Serious question, who was right about old well water?

My grandpa always said to never drink from the old well behind his farmhouse in rural Ohio, claimed it turned his teeth brown as a kid. Last summer I tested it anyway and found high sulfur and iron but nothing dangerous, so I started using it for my garden and everything grew twice as big. Now I'm wondering if he was just being dramatic or if the well was actually worse back in the 1950s, has anyone else dealt with family warnings that turned out overblown?

3 comments

3 Comments

noah8801mo ago

Kinda sounds like your grandpa was just repeating some old wives tale that got passed down. Half the stuff people say about well water from back then was just based on how it looked or smelled, not actual science. My uncle swore our family well in Indiana had "mineral rot" that would eat your teeth but when I tested it a few years ago it was basically just hard water with extra calcium. People back then didn't have testing kits so they just guessed based on brown stains and called it a day.

abby1895d ago

My cousin in Ohio had a well that stained everything orange for years, and @noah880 is probably right that half of it was just scary stories about minerals. We finally got a proper test done and it was just iron and manganese, nothing that would actually mess with your health like the old folks claimed. I mean, it still tasted like a tin can but at least we knew it wasn't secretly poisoning us.

coleman.seth1mo ago

Wait, did you check for heavy metals too? My grandma swore our well was cursed and I found lead from old pipes after testing deeper, so the water was actually fine in the 60s but got worse later.