Somebody's poisoned the waterhole!

That line, from Woody in Toy Story, became my life this week.

I mentioned that we had a well test taken after the flood, and my water (and my neighbour's water) contained both e-coli and colliform bacteria. We guessed it was because a house uphill from us had a septic field backup during the rains and floods, the sewage was pumped out onto the ground, and it ran across our well.

Both I and the neighbour shocked our wells using chlorine, a fairly straight forward but time-consuming process. In my case, the biggest issue was what to do with a hot water tank full of highly chlorinated water that would kill off the good bacteria in the septic tank.

I shocked mine once, my neighbour has done it three times. All of our well tests keep coming back negative. We appear to have killed of the e-coli, but the coliforms stubbornly remain -- and it has been a month since the flood.

This is the third bad water test I've had in 3 years. When I bought the house, the previous owner proudly trotted out 20 years of good water test results and boasted about the water quality. I'll let you draw your own conclusions from that one.

So we are "giving up" on getting our well back to cleanliness, and have embarked on a process to get a UV water treatment system installed. Small and (fairly) affordable, they kill bacteria in the water. Step one of that process is to get a water chemistry test done, since UV treatment devices don't like too much iron or total dissolved solids in the water. 

But the biggest issue is that, having spoken to a couple of plumbers in town, none have ever installed the things. Talking to the distributor of one of the manufactures, they're popular in rural environments but not in towns like Canmore & Banff. They recommended a plumber out of Cochrane.

We'll see how this goes. But I'm so tired of drinking bottled water, it's getting silly.