Water softener issue

ifconfig

I am having persistent issues with a domestic water softener.
Background is that our water is supplied via a group water scheme and the source is a natural spring supplied via a reservoir located at top of hill.
Our house may lie within the beginnings of a valley.
I have titrants drop kit to check hardness.
The unit is 9 litres capacity and I am using either Broxo or Axial pro salt tablets.
The unit is programmed to do a nightly backwash.
For the past 7-10days the mains water is emerging as hard from the tap.
This will ruin our immersion in a very short amount of time if not remediated.

My question is regarding the failure modes for a water softener ?
Is it possible that over a relatively short amount of time that the resin could become ineffective if the volume of hard water consumed by house is larger than the system supplied.
Ours is a 9litre and is outdoors/enclosed/insulated due to the way water supply was not diverted through our garage.
Our neighbour has a 25 litre unit and hasn't had the issues we have seen.
I've tried manual washbacks.
They worked on one occasion for a short time but the water has become hard again and the system is definitely adequately packed with salt tablets.

I am awaiting the servicing guy to come and check it.
However, I am tearing my hair out as to what might be going wrong.

-ifc

Dtp1979

ifconfig wrote: »

I am having persistent issues with a domestic water softener.
Background is that our water is supplied via a group water scheme and the source is a natural spring supplied via a reservoir located at top of hill.
Our house may lie within the beginnings of a valley.
I have titrants drop kit to check hardness.
The unit is 9 litres capacity and I am using either Broxo or Axial pro salt tablets.
The unit is programmed to do a nightly backwash.
For the past 7-10days the mains water is emerging as hard from the tap.
This will ruin our immersion in a very short amount of time if not remediated.

My question is regarding the failure modes for a water softener ?
Is it possible that over a relatively short amount of time that the resin could become ineffective if the volume of hard water consumed by house is larger than the system supplied.
Ours is a 9litre and is outdoors/enclosed/insulated due to the way water supply was not diverted through our garage.
Our neighbour has a 25 litre unit and hasn't had the issues we have seen.
I've tried manual washbacks.
They worked on one occasion for a short time but the water has become hard again and the system is definitely adequately packed with salt tablets.

I am awaiting the servicing guy to come and check it.
However, I am tearing my hair out as to what might be going wrong.

-ifc

I'm no expert on softness but I never heard of them back washing every night. Seems way too excessive. Is the bypass open on it by any chance?

aah yes

Hi ifconfig,

There is a diagnostic checklist for water softeners to run through.

But first of all, to confirm, your softener is a small unit of 9 litre resin, washing daily, and likely to have a basic type resin.

This means it is a short life budget system type, either a mini unit with an old design Fleck 5600 timer Asian copy valve (€500 to €700 fitted).




Or an equally old timer design US Autotrol 255 440 timer system (€600 to €800 fitted).





Cheaper resins as used in these small budget systems often have a 1000 regeneration cycle life, or 3 years on daily washouts before resin becomes compromised through wear and tear, (3 x 365 = 1095 days) or sometimes set to wash every 2 or 3 days which may allow 6 to 10 years life.

So the first question is how old is your unit ? Does it come with a 1 or 2 year warranty, or with annual servicing to pay for, with possible extended 5 or 10 year cover ?

Then to check the basics ...

Is the salt currently Axal Pro tablet salt (should have no blockage problems) or Broxo 6-15 broken chunk salt (often salt bridging or clumping / blockages).

Clean out brine tank if salt is clumped together. Hot water will dissolve the stubborn clumped together salt easier.

Next, check your toilets for possible seepage from float valves (ball cocks). It only takes a small dribble of 1/2 a litre a minute down the back of a toilet pan to exhaust a large amount of the daily capacity of these mini timer softeners. (Check with a dry tissue.)

Sometimes organic fouling of resin can occur in naturally sourced water such as spring wells, which impedes the usual capacity and more frequent washing is required. Cleaning the resin with Resin-Care or Res-Up or Iron-Out or some type of mild food grade 18% phosphoric acid, can help.

If none of this helps, and your supplier can't fix it, and you have had 5 or 10 years out of the unit, best advice is get a quality high capacity system.


The reason the 22, 25 and 28 litre systems give less trouble especially when using a high quality 2,000 cycle life such as Lanxess S1567 resin from Dusseldorf in Germany, on metered valves such as the best on the market the Clack WS1CI, is that systems then only need wash out once every 10 to 20 days for the average family of 4, on very hard 400 ppm water. So 10 days x 2000 cycles = 20,000 days = over 50 years resin life.

The systems components are then usually built in to these systems to allow for a 40 to 50 year life on these types of high quality high capacity metered water softeners, so every 10 years is just a mild service check or "health check" usually with free on site, parts and labour warranty for the nine years in between checks.

ifconfig

aah yes :

Many thanks for your very informative post.
Our system uses the Clack WS1CI pump , no idea of the type or resin.
the expansion vessel (if that is what it is - blue as in the pic) is around the size I estimate from the one which is shown far left in the front row.
I am using Broxo salt at the moment (is there an issue with bridging on that ?)
I have no idea as to what frequency of backwash the supplier/service guy set it at. I assumed nightly backwash.
Maybe it was 3 out of 7 days. Just guessing.

Anyway by way of further info.
While I've not been able to get him over I've managed to keep the water soft by putting 3+ litres of water into the salt reservoir and invoking a manual backwash, it counts down from 8mins and then does a second pass operation with saline (?) for 1hr approx.
When I do this and retest the water arriving at the main tap (after clearing the line) I get a positive result for soft water.
If I leave the unit to operate automatically and don't intervene by mixing in water into the salt reservoir I am getting hard water.
The salt reservoir is adequately topped up with salt.


Separately , the maintenance guy told me *never* to use aqua marine salt tablets as he said he has seen those foul up operation of resin.
He told me use Broxo or Axial pro brands only.
Is this due to bridging ? He never provided a technical explanation other than an anecdotal explanation.

Does my manual way of remediation give any clues to what might be going on ?
the water is from a spring well pumped to a reservoir at top of hill in our group water scheme.
The hardness is very high.
I have some measurements somewhere which I could post.

-ifc

aah yes

ifconfig wrote: »

aah yes :

Many thanks for your very informative post.
Our system uses the Clack WS1CI pump , no idea of the type or resin.
the expansion vessel (if that is what it is - blue as in the pic) is around the size I estimate from the one which is shown far left in the front row.
I am using Broxo salt at the moment (is there an issue with bridging on that ?)
I have no idea as to what frequency of backwash the supplier/service guy set it at. I assumed nightly backwash.
Maybe it was 3 out of 7 days. Just guessing.

Anyway by way of further info.
While I've not been able to get him over I've managed to keep the water soft by putting 3+ litres of water into the salt reservoir and invoking a manual backwash, it counts down from 8mins and then does a second pass operation with saline (?) for 1hr approx.
When I do this and retest the water arriving at the main tap (after clearing the line) I get a positive result for soft water.
If I leave the unit to operate automatically and don't intervene by mixing in water into the salt reservoir I am getting hard water.
The salt reservoir is adequately topped up with salt.


Separately , the maintenance guy told me *never* to use aqua marine salt tablets as he said he has seen those foul up operation of resin.
He told me use Broxo or Axial pro brands only.
Is this due to bridging ? He never provided a technical explanation other than an anecdotal explanation.

Does my manual way of remediation give any clues to what might be going on ?
the water is from a spring well pumped to a reservoir at top of hill in our group water scheme.
The hardness is very high.
I have some measurements somewhere which I could post.

-ifc

I have looked back on the feedback of nearly 50,000 bags of Axal Pro salt used over 10 years for several thousand clients, over a wide area and many differing water conditions and not yet seen a single count of blockage or bridging with Axal Pro salt. Axal has the highest purity rating of 99.9%, no other salt comes close in its class for both purity and reliability.

I class Axal as pure 100% reliable, and with blockages seen on many other brands I just would not advise to use any other salt, full stop. Also there is no real difference in the cost of Axal to other brands, at about €7 a bag this side of the country. For the risk of a €50 or €100 callout to clear out less pure clumped salt, it is just not worth using anything else, even for a euro or two saving over a year, in other areas.

For the issue with your water softener, I would advise a free callout for a look at it from one of a few specialists, and they can start with a few checks and a few questions that may nail the problem simple enough. PM me for those recommended in the different areas.

NIMAN

Do you recommend Hydrosoft tablets? Thats what my local coop stocks.

aah yes

axal pro only if you can

NIMAN

aah yes wrote: »

axal pro only if you can

Must see if I can find some, the guys who installed mine gave me a bag of hydrosoft and recommended them.