Hurricane Season and Your Water System: What to Do Before and After a Storm

Before the storm

1. Check the brine tank lid. Most softeners around Bradenton and Parrish sit outside. A cracked or loose lid lets rain in, and a brine tank full of rainwater is one of the most common service calls we get after a wet week.
2. Top up the salt. If power or roads are out for a few days, you won’t want to haul bags. Keep the tank at least a quarter full.
3. Unplug outdoor equipment if you expect surges. Softener valves, UV systems and chlorine injection pumps all have electronics. Unplugging them during the worst of the storm protects the circuit boards. Plug them back in once power is steady.
4. Fill some containers. Standard hurricane advice applies to everyone, city or well: store drinking water before the storm, because a well pump won’t run without power.

After a power outage

When the power comes back, look at the display on your softener. Many valves lose the time of day in a long outage, and a softener that thinks it’s 2 in the afternoon will regenerate while you’re showering. Reset the clock, or call us and we’ll walk you through it.

A UV system does nothing while it’s off. If your well has UV and the power was out, the water that sat in the lines during the outage wasn’t treated. Run the taps for a few minutes after the lamp comes back on. If the UV lamp shows a fault after the outage, call before drinking the water.

Reverse osmosis systems like the Micromax 7000 run on household water pressure and use no electricity, so an outage alone doesn’t affect them.

If your well was under floodwater

Floodwater can carry bacteria from septic systems, livestock and runoff into a well. If water covered the top of your well casing, treat the water as contaminated until it’s tested. The Florida Department of Health’s county offices publish the same basic steps:

1. Use bottled water, or bring tap water to a rolling boil for one minute, until the well is cleared.
2. Disinfect the well with unscented household bleach and let it sit in the plumbing for at least 8 hours, then flush until the bleach smell is gone.
3. Take a bacteria sample on two days in a row, after the chlorine is flushed out.

The full instructions, with amounts, are on the Florida Department of Health in Hillsborough County page. Your own county health department can tell you where to drop off a sample. If you have a water treatment system on the well, call us before you shock it. Bleach can damage softener resin and some filter media, so we usually bypass the equipment first.

If a boil-water notice goes out

Utilities issue boil-water notices after main breaks and pressure drops, and they’re common after big storms. Follow the notice exactly. Your softener, whole-home filter or drinking water system is not a substitute for boiling. Once the notice is lifted:

• Run each faucet for a few minutes to clear the lines.
• Change the refrigerator filter and dump the first few batches of ice.
• For an RO system, it’s a good time to change the pre-filters and sanitize the system. If you’re not sure how, we can do it on a service visit.

We post local boil-water notices on our water alerts page as we see them.

If floodwater reached the equipment

If water got into the softener’s control valve, the brine tank or a UV controller, leave it unplugged and call. A valve that sat underwater usually needs to be cleaned or replaced, and a flooded brine tank needs to be emptied, sanitized and refilled with fresh salt. The resin tank itself is sealed and usually comes through fine.

Common questions

Related: Water in the brine tank · Well water treatment · UV purification · Local water alerts · Snowbird checklist: softener and RO

Sources: Florida Department of Health in Hillsborough County, “Wells: Disinfecting after a Flood”; Puronics Micromax 7000 owner’s manual; Hydrology service records.