I live on a farm that doesn't get city water. As a result, the property has a water tank and rainwater is collected from the rooves (house and garage). I moved here in 2012 and drank that water for 11 years now without any problems... until now.

If you collect rainwater into a tank, and keep your gutters clean, and the water looks clean (a little leaf matter is okay, but not too much) then drawing water from the middle (not the sediment, not the floatsam) is generally very safe and drinkable, and tasteless too.

Anyhow, here goes my story.

I moved into my new house in July. Things were great for 4 months, but by mid November the water pressure had dropped... most noticably in the shower. This new house has two water filters that filter water for the whole house: a 20 micron filter followed by a 1 micron filter (the sleepout I used to be in only had a metal mesh screen filter and it was never a problem). I guessed that the filters were getting clogged and replaced them. Being right as usual, the water pressure returned to high pressure and my showers were again masssaging and wonderful.

Within two days however, the shower water started smelling foul, like open sewerage (more like farts, less like sulphur). My first thought was actual sewer gasses were coming up through the drain, but I eliminated that. It was the hot water. I compared cold tap water to hot tap water, and I boiled the cold tap water in the kettle to compare their smells at the same hot temperature. The water from the cold tap did not smell foul, but the water from the hot tap did.

So I drained the hot water heater. Let it refill and for 2 more days, all was bliss. Then the smell came back. I thought maybe I will need to flush it with a shock chlorine treatment.

About this time a float in a paddock watering trough broke off and the trough ran and ran overflowing until my water tank ran empty. I noticed the bottom of my water tank had quite a lot of organic matter buildup, but didn't smell bad. This is pretty typical. From time to time I have someone come clean it out, but the only guy I could get ahold of doesn't clean them he only delivers water. So I had 8,000 litres of chlorinated water added (to the 22,500 litre tank). I was hoping this chlorine would help fix the hot water tank issue. As that water was added, it stirred up the sediment quite a bit, so I waited about 4 hours before turning the pump back on and using water again.

Now the water tasted like chlorine. I don't like that taste, so I bought a 5 micron charcoal filter to replace the 1 micron normal filter. The result was not stellar... there was still some chlorine taste, and worse yet, now I was smelling and tasting that foul sewerage smell in my cold water!

So I stopped drinking water from my tap and I pulled out a ceramic water filter I had bought to filter alcohol with, and used it to filter this foul water. Luckily the filtered result tasted sweet and good and so I started bottling up the filtered water and intended to only use filtered water until I got the problem sorted.

After a few days I opened the bottle of filtered good water and ... it smelled foul. This really suprised me.

So it turns out my water smells and tastes foul if left alone in an anaerobic environment, and that there must be an anaerobic bacteria doing this, and there must be enough dissolved organic matter in the water for the bacteria to feed on.

So last night it rained and today I went to check the water tank to see how much it filled up. Well, it went from 1/3 to 2/3, but I was in for a shock. The water wasn't crystal clear at all. It was brown like tea (not like clay) and the whole water tank smelt foul.

So now with a lot of chlorine bleach and bottles of city water I've got my kitchen sanitized, and within a week I've got a guy coming to drain and clean the water tank, and I'll probably have to do chlorine shock treatments from the rain gutters all the way through to the taps, and to replace my water filters including the charcoal filter I just bought.

Anyhow, that's my story. Oh... and the toilet got to experience part of this story too, the part that I left out for your sake.