I’ve never lived in a place with a whole house water softener. I moved into this place a few months ago and followed the directions of adding salt to the proper place and all was fine.
I went to add salt yesterday and the tank is all salt. Not a drop of water in it. If I disconnect the water lead into the tank, no water comes out. The softener is plugged into a known good outlet. Water still flows throughout the house.
Where should I start troubleshooting?
If the only thing prompting your desire to troubleshoot is no water in the salt compartment, then please don’t. It’s normal to have no water in that compartment.
You may start a manual regeneration just to check.
Also remember that the ion exchange media goes bad after sometime so check your water (post and pre water softener ) for hardness. If there is not much difference in hardness, then you can replenish the media with phosphoric acid based liquid from amazon or replace the water softener.
Thanks. Yes, that is the only thing that concerns me is the no water. Every time I have checked, there has been a mixture of water/salt/brine which I was told was the key to keeping the softener happy.
And please help with “manual regeneration.” What does that mean? Also “replenish the media”
It depends on the salt type used (pellets or not) and the salt level to see the mixture.
Think of the basket or media in the softener as little magnets attached to a mesh. As the water passes through the hard components (Ca, Mg, Fe …) attach to these magnets. In about 24 hours (depending on the hardness), the magnets are all used up. Then you wash the basket with Salt (Sodium Chloride) water which removes the stuck hard components and the magnets are all ready for another round.
This washing of the basket or media with a salt solution is called regeneration . Your water softener is setup to do this once automatically every night or a time that you pick. You can also ask the softener to do this regeneration right now (manual). Read the owners manual and it will tell you the buttons to push to do a manual regeneration.
Over time the “magnets” described above get dirty and washing them with salt solution does not regenerate them fully. So there are special solutions to do this replenishment like this one
I troublesourced the problem to my wife. I asked her to buy bags of salt last week and she misunderstood me. Let me say that better. I was unclear in my request to her and it is completely my fault.
The result of my unclear and confusing request was that she put 80 pounds of salt in the tank. Will everything be okay and work itself out or do I need to manually remove the salt?
You should be thankful to her. She did the right thing - you are all set. No need to remove the salt.
80 pounds of salt isn’t all that much. It sounds like you have a separate brine tank. Most of them will hold at least a couple hundred pounds of salt.
The Brine tank holds salt and water. And the only time it should not have water in it is during regeneration. But the water level should ba only 6 to 12 inches of water. If you can see water in the tank either the water level is too high or the salt level is getting low.
The water in the bottom of the tank will become a saturated brine solution. During regeneration the softener will pull brine from the tank, pass said solution through the softener resen bed, and down the bed. Next it will flush the excess brine from the softener, and finally refill the brine tank with the proper amount of water for the next regeneration. During normal operation if you remove the line from the softener to the brine tank no water should come from the line. If the tank is full of sault you will not see the water in the bottom of the tank. No problem.
Yep. when our brine tank is low, I’ll pick up 4 50 pound bags and add them to the tank.
Bear in mind there are different kinds of softener salt. I use a “iron out” salt, to reduce iron in the water. There are other types.
The media can be replaced, there are a bunch of utube vids on it. I replaced mine recently.
Every few years, you may want to let the salt run out, take the brine tank outside and flush the mud out of the bottom. This mud is from naturally occurring contaminants in the salt that don’t dissolve into the brine. I’ve done it twice in 20 years.
I’ve seen those videos and it looks like a real pain. What was your experience?