Your Water Looks Different This Week. Here's What's Actually Going On.

By the tail end of Florida's wet season, plenty of homeowners notice something different about their tap water — a faint tea color that wasn't there back in the spring, water that runs a little cloudy right after a storm, or a whiff of rotten-egg smell in the shower. None of that automatically means something is wrong. Most of it is just what groundwater does after months of heavy rain. But a couple of those same symptoms are also worth taking seriously, and the trick is knowing which is which. The tea-colored one is the most common complaint this time of year, especially if you're on a private well. That color comes from tannins, which are tannic acid released when leaves, pine needles, and other organic matter break down in the soil above the aquifer. Heavy rain pushes those acids down into the groundwater faster than usual, which is why the color tends to show up, or get worse, right after Florida's wettest months. Tannins are dissolved in the water rather than floating as visible particles, which is also why a basic sediment filter won't catch them. Removing tannins takes a specific kind of filter media, an anion exchange resin built to grab those organic molecules directly. The upside is that tannins by themselves are a cosmetic problem, not a health one. They're plant acid, not contamination. Cloudy water is a different symptom with a similar seasonal trigger. If your well is shallow, or if the ground around it has gotten saturated, heavy rain can let surface water seep into the well itself, carrying fine sediment that shows up as turbidity, the technical term for water that scatters light instead of passing through it cleanly. A little turbidity right after a big storm, that clears up within a day of the ground draining, is common and usually not a red flag on its own. Turbidity that doesn't clear, or that shows up with no storm to explain it, is the more useful signal. It means something is getting into the well on an ongoing basis, and sediment is exactly the kind of thing that can carry bacteria along with it. The rotten-egg smell is its own thing again. That's hydrogen sulfide gas, produced by naturally occurring bacteria that live in groundwater and break down sulfur compounds in the soil and rock the water passes through. Wet season doesn't cause it exactly, but a wetter, more active aquifer can make it more noticeable. Like tannins, sulfide is mostly a nuisance rather than a danger. It's unpleasant enough that most people treat it, usually with an aeration or oxidation system, sometimes chlorination, but it isn't itself a sign that the water is unsafe. Color, odor, and metals like iron and manganese that cause staining all fall under what the EPA calls secondary drinking water standards, which are guidelines for taste, appearance, and smell (color under 15 units, iron under 0.3 milligrams per liter, manganese under 0.05, for reference) that are not enforceable and not based on health risk. That's the category most of what you're noticing right now probably falls into. The line worth paying attention to is different: any water that changed right after flooding, standing water near the wellhead, or a period where the well was actually submerged. That's when the safe assumption flips, and a bacteria test, specifically for total coliform, the standard marker, is worth doing before you keep drinking it. Not because the color told you to, but because the flooding did. So the actual triage, in order: let a cloudy tap run for a few minutes and see if it clears within a day of the rain stopping. If it does, that's routine. Note whether the change lines up with a specific storm or with standing water near the well, not just sometime this month. Treat tannins and sulfur smell as annoyances to fix on your own schedule, with the right filter for each rather than a generic one. And treat any change tied to flooding or well submersion as a reason to test for bacteria specifically, regardless of how the water looks or smells. None of this requires guessing. The color and the smell are both real signals, they're just signals for different things, and the only way to know which one you're looking at, tannins, turbidity, or something that actually needs a bacteria test, is to test for it rather than infer it from what's coming out of the tap. Primary references: EPA – Secondary Drinking Water Standards: Guidance for Nuisance Chemicals Florida Water Analysis – Florida Well Water Guide: How to Permanently Remove Iron, Sulfur, and Tannins North Florida Water Systems – 4 Ways Rain Can Affect Your Home's Well Water