Shepherdstown is one of the older communities in Jefferson County, and a lot of the housing stock — both in town and on the surrounding farmland along the Potomac — relies on private wells rather than municipal water. Older wells in this area are more likely to need a full system refresh rather than a single-component fix, since equipment from decades past often wasn't sized correctly for the household's actual usage or water hardness.
Common calls from the Shepherdstown area involve hard water scale buildup, sediment from older well casings, and the sulfur smell that shows up in a lot of this region's groundwater. A proper water test — not a guess — is the starting point for sizing the right softener, filter, or odor-removal system.
The Shepherdstown job that led to Scott's patented system
Back in 2007 — before Scott had thought of his patents — this Shepherdstown home was dealing with the troublesome trio of well water problems all at once: iron, hardness, and sulfur, plus some manganese. The original setup, shown in the "before" photo below, was a straightforward TurboSoft softener paired with an iron filter and pressure tank — it handled the iron and hardness, but did nothing for the sulfur smell.
To finally knock out the rotten-egg sulfur smell, Scott worked with what the customer already had rather than tearing everything out: he serviced the existing iron filter, rebedded the water softener with fresh resin, and repurposed a tank that had originally been used for air separation into a mixing tank. The full lineup, in order, went: a spin-down sediment strainer first to catch grit, then the iron filter, then a Stenner metering pump injecting chlorine (fed from a bleach solution holding tank) to knock out the sulfur, then the mixing tank to let that chlorine react, then the water softener, and finally a carbon filter as the last stage to strip the chlorine back out before the water ever entered the home. That's the "after" photo above — six treatment stages just to solve one household's water. One heck of a complex setup, for sure.
It was this job — juggling that many separate components just to treat iron, hardness, and sulfur in one house — that got Scott thinking about how to simplify and improve on standard water softener technology. That thinking eventually became the WSCPA (Water Softener with Closed Pressure Aeration), his patented system for handling iron, hardness, and sulfur without the multi-tank complexity seen in the "after" photo above.
Send a few photos of your current setup or the problem itself through the contact form, and Scott can usually tell you what's going on and what it'll cost before ever driving out from Hagerstown.
Check out our prices here.
Water Treatment System Repair in Shepherdstown
We repair and service water treatment equipment throughout Shepherdstown and Jefferson County, whether we installed it or not. See our repair & service page to learn more.