Green slime in my fresh water tank . . . again!!
I turned on my kitchen sink and even though the pump was working mightily - only a small trickle of water came out. I checked the filter on the water pump and YUCK - it was filled with green gunk. I emptied it 3 times!
I realized that I had forgotten the most important difference between city water and well water. City water is chemically treated; well water is not. I had only been thinking of the extra minerals and salts and had forgotten to take into account that well water is OK as long as you're using it up - but left in a hot, stagnant water tank, it will grow stuff. I had been buying water for drinking and just ignoring the water in my tanks (only using it for showers, dishes and toilet). For a week in Apache Junction I was hooked up to city water and so not using my fresh tank water at all. That's all it took to create an abundant growth of gunk.
Time to sanitize my tanks! I had just enough bleach left to pour into the tank and run through all my faucets. I let it soak overnight and then emptied my tanks on the way to Tucson. I'll have to drain my hot water heater too - this will give my an opportunity to clean it and replace the anode.
Now, I just need to do a couple of rinses to get the bleach and any remaining gunk out of the tank and lines.
It'll probably be awhile before I trust the fresh water to drink!
It's all good in the desert. Having camped in many degrees of sophistication - from backpacking to kayak camping to my little trailer, adversity is rarely a big problem. In web development, we used to call this 'graceful degradation' - meaning if your high-tech environment wasn't working, you could gracefully back up and get the job done with a more primitive mode of technology.
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