Editor’s note: This is the first of an occasional series on challenges with domestic water in and around Park City.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, RETEGO Labs President Les Merrill stepped into his Bountiful basement to find his floor submerged in a few inches of water.
Merrill, who’s made a career in detecting corrosion in water throughout the world and building large scale infrastructure systems for over 40 years, initially thought the blame for the problem could lie on the shoulders of the city.
“Every two years this water heater would go out,” he remembered. “I was mad. I was mad at the city. What is the city of Bountiful doing to my water to make it this bad? What’s going on?”
Merril had only limited things to do given the isolating nature of the pandemic. He also happened to have what he estimated to be about $5 million of testing equipment in his basement, instruments he and his partner had developed and prepared to put on the market in March and April 2020 — just in time for everything to change.
“All of those conferences we were going to go to, everything we were working on, just came to a dead stop,” he said.
He decided to test his water as where it entered his house and as it left his water heater five times every day at different times for a month.
“I had all the technology. I had all the pieces and parts,” he said. “I came up with what was probably the best study of water quality in a home ever done.”
What he found made him realize the water coming into his home from Bountiful’s system was not to blame for the string of broken water heaters in his basement. Rather, he said it met each federal and state guideline.
The problem came from inside the house.
After the city’s standard-meeting water passed through his softener, he said it became “intolerably corrosive.
“The water heater didn’t stand a chance,” he said.
Rather than replacing the heater for the fifth time under warranty, he found ways to treat his water and noted magnificent differences.
“Then we went on and did a few other things for some water heater companies that were having problems up in Park City with stainless steel water heaters going out in six months or a year,” he said. “We found the correlation with microbially induced corrosion, MIC, and another compound called sulfate-reducing bacteria.”
He also found sulfate reducing bacteria, something he had commonly seen while treating water in oil fields.
“We found it all over inside of the homes of Park City,” he said.
Yet, similar to his personal experience in Bountiful, the issue did not originate or even exist within the city’s distribution system.
Though Park City and Bountiful supply their water from different sources, the overarching issue in both locations was similar — the cities appropriately treat water in their systems and make it safe to enter people’s homes. But their treatment systems in their homes, through one process or another, then distort the quality.
Merrill has since reached out to professionals beyond his own company.
“This is an international scale issue,” he said. “There might be 150 million households in the United States. And this is affecting over 90% of them.”
In Park City, he found that one woman’s illness was caused by her homes’ copper pipes. Sulfate levels prevent softeners from being very effective, and because the community is rife with second homes and vacation rentals that often sit unused for periods of time, he’s found other issues involving water that sits stagnant in pipes, he said.
The difficulties he’s faced notifying communities of the problem comes through the fact that each need is different, and there aren’t any one-size-fits-all solutions.
Would homes be better off if they removed their soft water heaters?
“It depends,” he said.
“In Park City, you can be on the municipal water. It’s good. It meets all the criteria just like Bountiful does. It is right in the middle between scale and corrosion because of the way they balance it and watch it. But it’s very hard, so you do have to soften it or you’re going to have a lot of issues with your clothes and your hair and your skin and just everything,” he said. “But it’s not just calcium and magnesium which are the standard hardness elements.”
Yet, while different states and even different towns and cities within those states have different water treatment needs, it receives the same or similar treatment.
Future stories will delve into specific issues that are leaving people with low quality or even harmful water in their homes, which areas of Park City face what risks, developers who have taken unique approaches to water treatment, and how testing individual homes can lead create plans that will provide them with the best water.