How to extend the life of your water softener for years at little or no cost!

After servicing water treatment for a decade, I have found two things that homeowners must do if they want to extend the life of a water softener for many more years of faithful service. These two actions are simple. They should be done from the beginning when your water softener is new, but even if your system is old, you could start now, and it will add some life to your system.

The first action is to make sure the water softener is preceded by a sediment pre-filter. Even if you have never seen it, sediment and debris are present in your water. Water softeners do not take out sediment and debris, and they can either make their way through the softener to your plumbing and therefore the fixtures, or worse yet, they can clog and abrade the many seals and orifices in the control mechanism of your softener. If you have any iron in the water, you should be using a 5 micron pre-filter, since sedimentary (ferric) iron is between 5 and 10 microns in size and it can clog or foul water softener resin. Even if tests show that all the iron in your water is dissolved (ferrous), expect that some will occasionally sit in the well or pipes or well tank long enough to drop out of solution and become the clogging sedimentary type of iron.

Should every softener be installed with a pre-filter? Here is what happened last week to a new service customer of mine; they have municipal water and so when they paid their plumber to install a water softener, nobody recommended a pre-filter because it was assumed that the water was relatively clean. All went well for 3 years, but a couple of weeks ago, there was a fire on a nearby street and the firemen hooked up to the municipal hydrants and used water that flowed at a very high rate through the underground supply pipes. This disturbed a significant amount of sediment that had accumulated in the supply pipes over who knows how long. When the customers took showers in the next morning they noticed a huge drop in pressure. The softener was clogged so bad that the resin had to be dumped out and replaced along with the distributor tube. Had a pre-filter existed, it would have clogged too, but that cartridge would cost a few dollars to replace compared to the couple hundred it cost the customer in materials and labor to replace the resin.

The second thing is really a DON'T do, so it should be easy. Do NOT fill the brine vat. Only put enough salt in your brine vat to last a month. This is especially important if you use the potassium type of salt, since it drops out of solution very easily at the slightest temperature drop, and does not re-dissolve. I have seen cabinet model softeners (most big box units are cabinet models) ruined because the salt or potassium had packed and solidified so hard that it was impossible to dissolve with hot water or to break up with blunt force. When the salt solidifies like this, it will stop getting drawn into the softener during regeneration and the softener becomes useless. It is good to allow the salt to almost empty before you put another bag in, and the more efficient your system is (like Kinetico or Ecowater) the more important it is to follow this guideline.