Ferrous iron and iron bacteria

Last night I had a long conversation with a local water treatment company about our water. I explained to him what I thought it was, and gave him the "symptoms". He agreed with me that the brown water sounds like ferrous iron and the slime/foam sounds like iron bacteria ( which you can read about here http://www.problemwater.com/ir_iron.html ). I am going to send in a sample to be tested just to make sure. But in the meantime, let's pretend this is what my problem is. What would be an easy way to get rid of it? Both kinds pass through regular tap water filters. They can of course sell me a fancy filter, but I don't know if I can afford it yet. I have read that the iron bacteria can be eliminated by shock chlorination, so I think I will carry water to drink and for the fish for a while and dump a few jugs of javex in the well. It may sound crazy, but we have done in in the past after working on pipes or the pump and never had any problems from it. Even if that does fix this problem, I would still need to find a way (preferably cheap) of dealing with the ferrous iron. Any suggestions?

That's good to know. I got an iron test kit tonight. The free (non-chelated) iron is about 0.25mg/l. In the test kit book it says to do a water change if it is over 0.1, and to use a double dose of water conditioner on it. The chelated iron test read 0.1mg/l. Would this explain my problem? I tested from the cold tap. I will test from the hot later tonight or tomorrow, I feel it might be higher in there.

I was just looking through the book again and saw something I missed last night. Along with saying to use a double dose of water conditioner, it also simply says not to use the water in your aquarium if the free iron reads more than 0.1mg/l (mine seems to be about 0.25). This gives me hope of finally figuring out what I have been battling for all these months. I also got some java fern (not the fastest growing plant, I know) to help suck up some of the iron. I put them in the other tank for now though. I will transfer some to the brown/foam tank when they are doing well and multiplying.