What is with that rotten egg smell and taste that you find in various water sources?
Hi Carly, thanks for the question. The rotten egg smell you describe comes from a chemical called hydrogen sulfide. Hydrogen sulfide is produced by sulfur reducing bacteria that sometimes reside in various parts of shallow water aquifers. The hydrogen sulfide is the bacterial by product of it’s metabolic processes when it reduces sulfur for energy. Basically, hydrogen sulfide is bacterial waste matter. Only certain shallow wells have this problem. It is more likely to occur if you have a dug well or bored well, but it can occur in any well in a shallow aquifer. Sometimes it’s a seasonal issue, and with other wells it occurs all the time. Hydrogen sulfide is a very powerful odour causing chemical. The human threshold for detecting hydrogen sulfide is a concentration of only 0.0005 parts per million. At 0.1 ppm, it becomes very displeasing to people. As bad as it smells, at the low concentrations found in well water it is not toxic. It’s not even an irritant, it’s only an aesthetic probl
