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Comment by LinuxBender | Hacker News Reader

I agree with the risks stated in the article but I would add that people on well water should still use bleach and other strong chemicals in their bathroom from time to time. Well water does not contain Chlorine bleach and there are a number of bacteria that can grow out of control in a bathroom when Chlorine is not present in the water. Some feed off the fats in soap scum, commonly on the bottom of the shower curtain. A home I bought came with this little gift and I've had to cycle through bleach, Lysol and high powered UVC lamps to get rid of it. And UVC lamps come with the risk of converting O2 to O3 Ozone which requires good ventilation.

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Liquid Chlorine worked the best in my use case. Bought a house in Florida with no bathroom exhaust fan. Fought tooth and nail to keep it at bay. Squeegeeing the walls, apply after shower mildew/mold inhibitor. Nothing worked.

Liquid Chlorine did. Open bathroom window, placed a fan in front of it and sprayed down the entire shower heavily. Yes the smell I was powerful, I wore a respirator. It's been over a year and we haven't had it come back at all. We still squeegee and apply mildew/mold inhibitor and we now have a very high powered exhaust vent in the master bathroom.

I try not to spray bleach when I can avoid it -- wiping or pouring keeps more of the bleach on the surface instead of floating around in the air.

Makes complete sense. Less to breathe also. Can't believe I didn't think of that. Thanks!

Similar situation, I have a bathroom with an exhaust fan but no openable windows. Besides the squeegee religion, I have a circulation fan on a timer that I let run for a couple hours to dry things out.

That is the one thing I wish it had was a timer. Was thinking about replacing the flip switch with a turn knob style timer.

Consider cleaning with Pine-Sol too. It’s a mold/mildew inhibitor by its nature.

Never thought of that. We'll definitely try it. Thanks!

I added a chlorine injection pump to my well that adds a little bit whenever the main pump runs. Water quality very much improved.

Last time I was in a thread with homesteaders doing sketchy things with water, one of the voices of reason invoked Legionaire's Disease.

Legionaire's disease being a rather nasty bacterial pneumonia, grows in water and needs to be aerosolized to get into the lungs. Like might happen when using a low-flow showerhead.

I've heard some horror stories as well. There are lab tests one can send off their water to test for literally hundreds of metals, toxins, pathogens and more. Most towns will also do limited testing. There are also bacteria test kits on Amazon but they only test for a few things.

My well tested clean but I still intend to shock it with chlorine. The bummer is that this is such an old well they did not make it easy to shock it without pulling the pump but I am going to replace the pump anyway because I think it was installed in the 80's.

Correct me if I'm wrong but don't you also want to retest after a flooding event (even if your well head is never submerged)?

Absolutely. AFAIK there have been no floods here. I get snow but the underground well room is covered with a heavy concrete cover. My home is much higher than the fields around me. That said I have no idea if there are any volcanic passages that would allow unfiltered ground water to reach the well. The mineral and bacterial tests would suggest that is not occurring.

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