Help with Water Softener

davkav

Hey guys,

I am having a problem with an existing water softener that I have in my house. We recently bought the house and as a result I have no instructions for the unit nor can I find any on the internet.

Attached is a picture of the unit. I have configured it to run its cycle once a week but I am finding that it is using an awful lot of salt. 25kg in about 3 months. A neighbour reckons he uses a 25kg every 6 months.

Also after its cycle the water in the tank does not seem to fill back up to where I had manually filled it. Is this normal? It looks like if I do not top it up manually it will eventually run dry.

Does anyone know how to configure this softener or where I can find a manual for it?

youtheman

I fitted an almost identical unit to my folks house (unfortunately I'm not near there so I can't get my hands on the instructions easily). Some things to note:

1. the tank in never full. I keep my folks unit topped up with salt, and you can't see the water level. I had to move it recently, so I had to take the salt out. As far as I can remember the tank is normally about 1/2 full.

2. to set the day it backwashes you are supposed to either pull the tab(s) out, or in (and I can’t remember which). Can’t see how many tabs are activated but I assume from your OP that you know how to do this.

3. the time is 3 am, according to the photo. So either you’re a night owl or the clock is wrong. You’ll note that the clock turns ant-clockwise (go figure!!), so to set the correct time grab the little white knob, pull it out and rotate it until it shows the correct time. The unit is automatically configured to do the backwash at some time around 2-3 in the morning. You can’t adjust this but you could always set the clock at an incorrect time to adjust.

4. softeners are either supposed to do a backwash on a ‘timed’ basis, or on a ‘metered’ basis (i.e. they measure total volume throughput and adjust the backwash interval accordingly). The former is the cheapest and simplest. But the downside is that there is no way to conserve salt as it might be doing a backwash when there has been no water ‘softened’ at all.

5. In summary, all you have to do is set the clock time, and the day(s) for the backwash and away she goes. Listen for the mechanism turning to confirm that the transformer and motor are working.

davkav

Cheers youtheman. Makes sense alright and it is configured as you say above. I was just worried it was using more salt than normal and if the water level had to be monitored.

zoom_cool

Where can you buy one of these as I need to get one?

aah yes

see ...

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=68792475