Water softener woes

[dlminehart]

I'd mentioned a couple months ago that my 10 year old water softener seemed to have given up the ghost. Even replacing the clearly defective timer motor, followed by doing the usual replacements of gaskets and such, brought no joy. It would act like it was working but not use up any salt.

Luckily, our local water district offered a $150 rebate on new demand-initiated water softeners, and Sears had a $100 discount on their smallest Kenmore product. Even more luckily, the hookups for the new model were identical to those of the hold model, not just in size but in position. Piece of cake to replace the old with the new.

But, still no joy! D**n thing acts like it's working but doesn't use any salt. Anyone willing to talk me through debugging this?

[Tom Slick]

when you manually regen do you get water flowing into the salt tank?

[Hellrazor]

Are you sure the salt didn't dam in the tank? The softner will run but the water will remain hard. The salt will form a hard dome in the bottom of the tank and will not settle. You need to guess where the bottom strainer is, mark a WOOD dowel of some kind (old broom handle) to a set depth and dream your salt tank is a butter churn

If you err on the side of depth and crack the strainer you are in trouble. They are USUALLY about 6" high and span the whole bottom of the tank. I'd mark the dowel so I can tell when to stop pushing it into the salt or in some cases you will need to hammer it in.

If this is the case, I would do this every time you add salt OR let the salt run out, empty the tank and take it apart to clean it. But the problem can always come back...

[Ed62]

Are you sure the salt didn't dam in the tank?

That was my first guess.

Ed

[Salty]

You should be able to see the brine water moving through the tube and that will tell you if the regen is taking place.
However, if there is, as stated here, a dome formed in the salt tank, the best way to resolve it is to empty the salt tank. I've done this years ago and it just involves some work.
Scoop out all you can and put it in some buckets. When you get to the point where you can move the tank, take it outside or near a drain and clean out the sediment in the bottom.
Put it back together and replace any parts needed and fill it up again.

[Bruce Cohen]

Have you checked the amount of salt setting per regen. I have a Culligan and there is an indicator to set the amount of salt used per regen. I believe that that's set based on how hard your water is.

Possibly, the setting is at 0 or some minimal amount.

Good luck,

Bruce

[dlminehart]

when you manually regen do you get water flowing into the salt tank?

Hard to tell, with many bags of salt in there.

[dlminehart]

Are you sure the salt didn't dam in the tank?

Pretty sure. This is first use, after all, and I put a dowel down there and found no "bridging".

[dlminehart]

Have you checked the amount of salt setting per regen.

On this unit, you set the hardness of your water and it does the calculations. I have it set for 7 or 8, I believe. Not very hard, which is why I gave it a couple weeks before deciding the salt level wasn't falling at all.

[dlminehart]

I noticed that the drain hose was not going in a steady decline from softener to wall drain. Instead, it went down about a foot, back up about 6 inches, and then down about a foot again. On blowing through it from the softener end, there seemed to be a lot of resistance. I noticed that there were two wall drains behind my clothes washer. The softener was draining into the top one, at about the same height as the outlet from the water softener. The washer was draining into the lower one, down near the floor. I now know that the washer is supposed to drain higher than its own water level, so I swapped the drains to which the two hoses are attached. Noticed that the softener drain hose had very little resistance now when I blew through it. I'll see whether that fixed it.