Need an enviro / chemist opinion on a water sample

[beej67]

I have a client who owns a building in an urbanized downtown area. They have some water accumulating in their basement, and they don't know where it's from. I have not been to the site to inspect it yet. Their maintenance guy got some sort of home testing kit, and gave the client these numbers:

Total chlorine 0 ppm.
Nitrate nitrogen 10 ppm.
Copper 1.3 ppm.
Nitrite nitrogen 5ppm.
Alkalinity 80 ppm.
Hardness 0.
Ph 9

The client is going to inspect the issue tomorrow, and asked me if I could glean the source of the water from the above information. Possibilities are condensate, sanitary sewer leak, groundwater, surface water, domestic water.

I told him it didn't seem like a domestic water leak because there's no chlorine, and it didn't seem like condensate because of the pH, but qualified that by saying this really isn't my area of expertise.

Any ideas? I'm no expert on water chemistry, but overall that seems fairly clean to me. Groundwater?

Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East -

http://www.campbellcivil.com

 

[Ron]

Not a chemist, but with no hardness and a pH of 9, along with some copper in it, I would look toward condensate from an AC unit. Nitrates and Nitrites are probably from algae.

 

[bimr]

It looks like blowdown from a boiler. A typical boiler water would have zero hardness, some condensate and slidghtly elevated pH. The copper is probably a corrosion product. Nitorgen is typically present in the raw water.