Well Water Problems
When your water brews itself into weak tea.
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Tannins are natural organic compounds leached from decaying leaves, cedar, oak, and peaty soils — Hill Country wells and shallow wells near creek bottoms see them often. They dissolve into the water itself, tinting it yellow to brown, staining laundry and fixtures yellow, and sometimes adding a bitter, earthy note.
Tannins fool people because they mimic iron. The difference: iron creates orange-brown deposits and shows up on a metals test; tannin-tinted water can pass an iron test completely clean. One quick clue — fill a clear glass and let it stand overnight. Iron settles or stains the glass; tannin color stays uniformly in solution.
Removal is its own specialty: a dedicated anion-exchange tannin resin (a cousin of softener resin, tuned for organics), usually placed after a softener, with oxidation and filtration upstream if iron and sulfur are also present — which, in tannin country, they usually are. That interaction is exactly why we run a forensic water analysis before designing: tannins, iron, hardness, and pH each change how the others get treated.
Uniform tea color that never settles = tannins. Particles or glass staining = iron. Both = a combination well, common here.
Confirm it →Yellow laundry and porcelain stains with a clean iron test are the tannin signature.
Testing →A dedicated tannin resin removes the organics; the system is sequenced with softening and filtration to protect every stage.
Well solutions →Tannin wells usually carry iron, sulfur, or low pH too — the design has to solve the set, not the symptom.
Sulfur too? →Dissolved organics from decaying vegetation — the same compounds that color tea. They tint water yellow to brown, leave yellow stains on laundry and porcelain, and can give a faintly bitter or earthy taste.
No — they're an aesthetic problem. But they matter twice: the staining, and the fact that tannins can foul softener resin and interfere with other treatment, so they have to be addressed in the system design.
That's the classic tannin signature. Iron stains orange-brown and tests as metal; tannins tint the water itself and pass an iron test clean. A simple standing test and lab analysis separate the two.
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