Water Softener question

[Jason Godfrey]

Hello.

My water softener hasn't been working for quite some time. I finaly got fed up with hard water and attempted to fix it tonight. (I cleaned out the venturi.) I ran a recharge (seemed to draw down the brine, which I don't think it was doing before since it wasn't using any salt) and tested the water a few hours later on a cold water faucet on a softened pipe. I let it run for a little bit to get old water out of the pipe. The test showed hard water - 15 to 20 grains.

So my question is this - how much time do I need to wait before I should see a change in softness? I wouldn't be surprised if it needs more then a few hours after a recharge, but also don't expect it to take weeks.

Basicaly I'm wondering at what point do I open it up again and take another look?

Thanks

- Jason

[Tony Hwang]

Hi, Charge couple more times and slowly it'll get back to normal. Resin has been completely discharged. I had same problem and it took almost a week. Tony

[PrecisionMachinisT]

I had a similar problem a while back, had filled ours with six or eight bags of salt and a bunch of it kinda all caked into the bottom into a solid mass.......

Im thinking the water wasnt picking up enough salt in the brine due to reduced surface contact.

End result was the same though, it quit working properly and after cleaning it all out and several recharges later, its now working fine again.

Lesson for me here is now I dont put in more than 1 or 2 bags of salt at a time.

[David Martel]

Tony,

Are you sure of this? I thought that the charging cycle capable of recharging the resin in one cycle. My guess is that the softener needs to be rebuilt. Cleaning the venturii was a start but I'll bet that lots of o-rings and other rubber parts have failed. A possible test that Jason could do is to measure the hardness before and after the water goes through the softener. If there is no change in hardness then the softener is not recharging.

Dave M.