Hi. My wife & I just bought a house a couple months ago, in which the previous owner had installed a water softener. I assume its working correctly -- as the dishes don't have spots and at first the water felt a bit "slimy." But, then we figured that's just because we were used to hard water all these years. Now, we like feel of the water.
The gentleman before us lived by himself. He had the setting as follows:
Hardness: 25. (Available range is 1-150, default is 20)
Regen day: 14 (Available is range is 1-28 days) The manual says this is the MAXIMUM number of days between regenerations. So, I assume it could do it sooner than every 14 days, if it detected it was necessary? Is this correct? He had it at 14 days for himself, so maybe I should move it to 7 days since there are two of us?
Regen time: 2am ... although I could have sworn I saw it doing the regen one time in the afternoon. So, I guess this goes back to my previous question ... will it regen automatically if it feels its necessary to do BEFORE the setting you have programmed in?
I have left the setting as he had them and everything "seems" ok, but I'm wondering if maybe I should adjust something for our situation? Also, I noticed the other day that the salt tank was finally getting low (to where I could see water on the bottom), So, I just dumped in a bag of salt that he had left behind for the tank. Was this ok to do or should I have done it during regeneration?
Finally, is there any additional maintenance I should be doing with this thing? The manual (which stinks) mentions something about sanitizing with bleach and allow the system to complete the regeneration cycle. What about cleaning the salt tank itself?
Sorry for all the questions, but the manual that came with this is horrible and this is my first experience with a water softener. Thank you!
-Jim