Hello, new to the group so please let me know if I broke rules, etc.
Just bought a house with a Culligan System 23 softener. It's probably about
12 years old. The people who had the house before weren't very good about maintenance or keeping records, and I never got to talk to them so I don't know the story with the softener. It was unplugged at move-in, with the culflo valve bypassing the system. BUT, the adventurous sort that I am, I decided to fire it up anyway with a manual recharge. There was about 1' of salt in the tank, and some brine perhaps a foot over that. I kept an eye on it the whole time, and the cycles seemed to go in proper sequence - but it seems the valve for the final rinse stuck open and as long as the culflo valve is on "soft water" a rinse runs to the drain - even if timer is unpluggeeed. I have gone back to hard water to stop the rinse. From perusal of earlier posts it seems to be a good bet that the valves are dirty - so here are my questions:1- can you give me any other things I should do/should have done before returning the softener to service? Was I crazy to just turn it on? The water does seem to be soft when it goes through, but of course I'm not sure if that just in my head because in theory the water is not going through the resin if the rinse is going on, right?
2- I'm planning on cleaning and restocking the salt tank as specified in the manual this weekend, but perhaps only after I look at the valve system. I would consider myself fairly adept at figuring stuff like this out but was wondering if the valves are especially tricky, will I be needing O-rings, CLR, etc?3- There is evidence of problems before because the area around the softener shows some signs of corrosion and even rust where the drywall corners have been wet. I'm thinking the brine line must have been leaking pretty bad at some point - any thoughts?
I really don't even mind the hard water and I like experimenting with this sort of thing so I'm, not ready to say "hey, Culligan Man" just yet because I don't want to pay anything if I don't have to. Any caveats or further advice would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Rick