Tannin Treatment

Tannin in your water can be a real problem. It can be difficult and expensive to treat. But there is a better way.

I should probably start out with an explaination as to what tannin is. Tannin is rotten vegitation that gets into your water aquafer. It causes your water to stain and have a yellow tint to it. It also has an odor as you can well imagine.

It is common to treat tannin with anion resin which retails for about $575 per cubic foot. Often times this resin is mixed with cation resin to treat both the tannin and hardness of the water. A decent sized 2 cubic foot system is going to cost well over $1000. There is a new type of carbon out that is capable of filtering tannin and it's only $100 per cubic foot. If you already have a softener, or hardness is not a factor, then this "Aussie Carbon" would be the solution for your tannin problem.

The Aussie Carbon is produced by steam activation which results in extremely porous particles. It is capable of treating the normal water problems associated with carbon such as odor, taste and chlorine, but can also deal with tannins. So a simple auto-backwashing carbon filter with this media can sell for as little as $600. About the same amount as it would cost for a cubic foot of anion resin but without the added expense of a softener system.

We have only had experience with a couple of these Aussie Carbon filters locally here at Water Value Co., but they both proved very successful at removing tannin. We are so confident in this media that we will be adding it to our online inventory of carbon filters by the end of the week.

A typical application for this media would be a well system with some type of softener to treat hardness, the Aussie Carbon filter and a reverse osmosis system for drinking and cooking. The added feature of a carbon filter system in this example greatly enhances the flavor of the water. Install it downline from the softener and it will also remove and sodium from the cation water treatment.