Working Wives & Retirement

[Telly]

"Water Conditioner" must be the new marketing name for water softener

Ahhh, I remember those days... lowering big blocks of salt into the brine tank, or hefting bags of salt pellets and pouring them in... regeneration cycles... sticking valves or timer problems... the time it overflowed...

You don't want to be drinking the high sodium content water. We put in a separate water line and added a small auxiliary faucet onto the kitchen sink to have unsoftened water available for drinking/cooking. Got that idea from my father inlaw. He did that with his well water. Also want outside water faucets to be connected pre-softener to avoid using up all your softened water, and soft water probably wouldn't have been good for trees, etc.

We get a little calcium buildup here, but nothing like where we used to live.

 

[bruce1]

Water Conditioner THis morning i would have settled for a @!#!$%& pump that worked. OH Well. Four Hundred Dollars and four hours of hard labour later I have water again.

Bruce

 

[Nords]

Telly, it's a new millenium.

Sorry, Telly, DIY is dumbed-down more than ever before. But it's still a water softener.

I've had a second one operating for seven years (still going strong) and I've never found anything in the inlet screen. Its mechanical timer has never had a cycling problem and it's never overflowed. Our newer conditioner uses an impeller and a solid-state controller, and we've had no problems for the last couple years. I don't lift salt bags anymore because we outsourced the task to our kid. (I wonder if block salt is cheaper than Morton pellets!) We can even buy iron-removing salt for about $5/month. I'm willing to pay that to skate out of toilet patrol.

"High-sodium content water". I'm not sure you or your doctor's lab technician can tell the difference. For a taste-test comparison, salt water is 35,000 PPM sodium. Human saline is about 0.9% or 9,000 PPM. U.S. Dept of Interior's "moderately-hard water" category is 60-120 ppm. Our local utility's water-quality report lists our hardness at 80 ppm and I've confirmed that with a conductivity meter. So chugging an entire liter of our water containing 80 PPM Na would be the same as imbibing 80 mg of the ion. That's only about 2.5-7% of the USDA's recommended daily "safe & adequate" limit of 1100-3300 mg and it pales in comparison to a can of Pringle's.

Some purists even connect a conditioner before their outside faucets so that they're not washing their cars in hard water. But I don't wash cars either so I don't care about that.

And I'm sure glad I don't have a well!

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

I routed a hot and cold "softened" water pipe to the garage and installed a sink there with a hose hookup for washing cars and other "soft water" tasks. Just took the lines from the washing machine thats in the laundry room right next to the garage. Pretty easy. That way the irrigation and outside water keeps the minerals, which are at least a little beneficial to the plants.

Sams and costco have the bags o' salt for half what you can get them for at other stores, btw. Havent seen blocks of salt, but I think you need a certain amount of surface area exposed to the water for optimum salination.

Drinking softened water does add some salt to the diet and people that must strictly limit salt should consider drinking bottled water. However, the intake is modest...one analysis I saw said that saltwise, drinking all your water from a softener every day was the equivalent of eating a slice of bread each day.

 

[Brat]

I lived most of my life in Portland where the water is so soft it is bad for your teeth (until they put floride in). A few years ago we moved to Bainbridge Island. Innocent us, we did not consider the posibility that there is hard water in the northwest!

Now, today, hubby is installing a water softener (hot water heater failing so the time is right). We need salt, my research and the softner manufacturer recommends Diamond (Cargill) products. Does anyone know where the Cargill softner salt is sold? Costco, Lowes, Home Depot?

 

[Nords]

Some is cheap and some is expensive...

... but it's all salt.

Morton sells 40-lb bags of the stuff, with big chunks or little chunks or even iron remover, for about $5. I wouldn't spend any time searching for specific brands unless you can get it cheaper than that.

And now that our local salt-stocking KMart has been sold to Sears, I'm gonna have to check our local CostCo. I haven't seen it there before but we can always ask for it!

Good move on replacing the water heater. Buy a high-efficiency model, loosen up the anode rod & wrap its threads with teflon tape, and go wild on heat traps & piping insulation. Because with the water conditioner feeding it, the water heater will last well beyond 20 years.

 

[Brat]

We are buying a Polaris. It is three times the price of the others but it is more efficient, has better recovery, and much longer warranty. The replacement cost of the heater is more than the hardware, if you aren't handy you pay a plumber.

We think the reason why our current heater failed is the anode wore out. Every serious boater knows to change their zink plate periodically but I have never known of a similar discussion about water heater anodes.

Our hot water pipes are really well insulated. To increase hot water capacity during peak use periods the system has a timed circulator, also during those times I don't need to purge the line of cold to receive hot.

It appears that water softner salt is cheap enough. The softner manufacturer recommends Cargill (Diamond) products. My web-based research surfaced a former chemist at Morton who wrote that the Cargill softner salt was better. I suspect that I am seeing marginal differences so will purchase the sodium chloride product I can find.

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

We installed one of the tankless Bosch heaters at my wifes old house. I'm impressed with how well it works. Hot water comes up as fast as the old 40gal tank heater, and you can leave the hot on all day long and still get hot water. This is their smallest unit and since this is a 1 bath house, it suffices. I dont think you could do laundry, dishes, and take a shower all at the same time, but who does that anyhow? It was about $400 and did suffer from some installation follies, such as the flue vent needing to be 5" instead of 4", and in a different place since this unit mounts to the wall. Since we had the whole house skinned down to the rafters, it wasnt that big of a deal though.

The larger one that supplies enough for 2 or more bathrooms goes for $1000 and up. I dont think I'd have bit on that price...I might have installed two of the small ones in series, which some people have done with good results.

Regardless of the condition of the water, this unit should go for 20+ years, and each component can be replaced a la carte as it wears or breaks.

 

[Telly]

Re: More on Water Softeners

Nords, back on the Water Softener topic

I've been softener-less for over 15 years now, so some of my info is dated:

Block salt was cheaper than Morton pellets. But the blocks were hard to get into the brine tank (our tank was over 4 blocks high). And letting them drop down to the bottom through the water didn't fill me with confidence that sometime the plastic tank, loaded with salt water, might burst from the dislocation. Dissolving salt blocks tended to go bump in the night as they settled. The blocks also left a bit of residue, which built up after a while requiring a take-down and cleanout. The Morton pellets were easier, quiet, and didn't seem to leave a residue.

We added something to the brine tank every couple of months for rust removal, don't remember what it was any more.

Had the timer motor die once, in the brine tank refill cycle. So the tank kept filling, and filling, and filling...

After replacing the timer motor, I added an emergency drain. I drilled a hole a few inches down from the top of the brine tank. And twisted into the hole a piece of polyethylene hose (the whitish stuff) which then lead through a hole in the floor and then outside. Filled up the tank, then tested it by putting an empty bucket into the tank, and pushing it down hard with both hands to suddenly displace a lot of water. Worst case test. With the vertical drop in the hose, it created a real fast syphon when the inlet got covered with water. Worked great. Got used once later when a valve stuck in the brine tank to resin tank movement, when water through a venturi creates suction to pull the brine out. With the stuck valve, the water went INTO the brine tank instead!

I hope you have valves in the pipes to/from the softener, and a shunt valve that you can open between them. So that you can completely isolate the softener. Some softeners have an internal valve that you can do a manual bypass with, but that doesn't help if the softener itself has a problem, or has to come out. I like separate isolation valves. I also learned that those isolation valves need to be worked every year or so, or they may seize up.

We all could taste the salt in softened water. Not only at our house, at other peoples too. yuck!

 

[John Galt]

Soft water? I almost forgot there was such a thing.
Can't recall the last time we had it and after reading Telly's post I am more than ready to soldier on without it.

John Galt

 

[Nords]

It's a whole new generation of equipment.

Hey, Telly, gimme a break. I spent two decades with submarines and valves are my life (such as it is). Because of that heritage, my spouse is one of the few on earth who's been dragged on sightseeing tours through every plumbing specialty store on Oahu.

Modern conditioners are largely a standard design and, even though it's only been 15 years, your experiences are reminiscent of driving a Model T. Most conditioners even use the same timer valve, although the evolution from analog to digital may spread that out again. The overflow drain is standard, too; you should've applied for a patent on it. If you still could find a place in your home for a simple, reliable water conditioner then it might be time for a stroll through your local Home Depot or Sears.

Ours have bypass valves outside the entire system. The entire conditioner (timer & controller valves included) can be disconnected and carted away for work, leaving the bypass manifold in with the piping. But again I haven't had to work on either conditioner for seven/two years, and checking injector screens can be done in place with a small screwdriver. (Not that I've found anything in the screens to make it worth the effort, either.)

I never fill a tub full of salt since it'd have to be removed in the event that the system had to be moved for repairs (as TH has reminded the board). A 40-lb bag gives us about four-six weeks (depending on usage). While your block salt may have been cheaper, it sounds like it was dirtier. The Morton stuff leaves little enough residue that I haven't had to clean a tank in at least four years. And the Iron-out is included in one variety. At $5 a month Morton's not high enough on my radar screen to care.

I can't taste anything in conditioned water-- certainly not salt-- but I can sure taste the sulfur & chlorine in some Mainland locations. And I'll only drink bottled water in Central/Gulf Florida, especially after seeing what it does to glass coffeepots. But perhaps the cancers in that branch of my family are due to other lifestyle choices.

The submarine force spends far more taxpayer dollars on monitoring & maintenance (and premature replacement) than on actual repairs. Considering how much it costs to train & maintain the submariners themselves, I guess that's a good investment. Of course every valve in our house is in my small-valve maintenance program, including annual cycling & grooming (WTE of overpressure reliefs). My spouse claims that it's cheaper to indulge me than it would be for the psychiatrist's expenses. It saves a lot on sprinker repairs, too...

 

[Telly]

John,
I grew up with hard water. That was just the way it was! It was later that we got into the water softener thing, the first house we bought had one. Pulled old pipes out of houses back there, galvanized pipes had just a narrow water path down the center. They had become lime-lined over the years!

Here surface water is the source, rather than wells into limestone, so water softeners are extremely rare. In fact, I only know of one person who has one. He wasn't up to putting one in himself, and he had a tough time finding anyone that sold/installed them, since there is no demand. He wanted one because he always had one in another state. With slab on grade construction here, I wouldn't want to think about how to get access to the waterline at the right point.

Nords,
since the topic of the original post many pages back was "Working Wives & Retirement", shouldn't your wife be the one to exercise all those valves per your maintenance schedule?

I've seen (elsewhere!) that water softeners have become packaged differently. Rather than plumbing equipment with a welding-tank look like they used to be. But underneath, I think the basic process is the still the same. Still have to have valves either mechanically or electrically activated.

Many years ago I remember at a house next door back there the Culligan Man bumping a resin tank carrier up and down their basement stairs. "Hey Culligan Man!"