rural water softeners

I am looking to replace my 20 year old water softener - - any suggestions ? .. recently noticed some staining in the toilets. A fancy iron-remover is not required - there is a small amount of iron in the well water - but if I can get 20 years service from a softener - good ! Test results are Mg / Ca 13 / gal Iron 2 ppm total 19 grams per gal Southern Ontario John T.

Reply to
hubops
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Gary was a great guy to have around. On his advice I dumped the beads out of my old water softener, cleaned the strainers, got a local guy to order me a new load of beads and I was good to go. When the timer went bad, some years later, I found one on the interweb for around $100, including a new float valve. There is really not much that goes wrong with a water softener.

Reply to
gfretwell

Your iron problem seems similar to mine and that would be that you are dealing with what they call/called "bacterial iron" It is iron that is in the water which settles out of still water rather than a heavier concentrate which stains anything it comes in contact with.

Bacterial iron can be dealt with by the softening process provided you don't exceed the capacity of the softener between recharging.

Formerly, our old Sears softener did a great job so long as we didn't forget to add salt to the brine tank or, more frequently, have a period of heavy soft water usage between recharges.

That problem was pretty much solved by the switch to the newer Sears control head which bases its recharge cycle by water use and hardness vs. water hardness and fixed timing (i.e. every three days or every two days, whatever). I think this type of timer was introduced by a company called Kinetico though they may have not been the first, merely the first that I know of.

What I have had success with over the years with the demand recharge system is to take hardness (I think mine is something like 26 gr of hardness) and multiply it by a factor of 1.2 or 1.3. You can tweak it whatever way you wish but I started with 20% increase since if I "run out" of soft water at noon unless I intercede manually at noon and trigger an instant recharge, I know that the required recharge will not be occurring until around 2:00AM the following morning. IOW, my intent is to always have the softener recharge itself BEFORE it really needs it.

Works for me, my 2 cents and worth every penny that you pay for it!

Reply to
Unquestionably Confused

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Reply to
Walt

Thanks everyone - for the input. Some good general info at the Lowes web link - Whirlpool Manual -

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I might just go that route - and forego the long warranty lure ... John T.

Reply to
hubops

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