A Guide to The Maintenance Of Water Softeners
Hard water consists of high levels of calcium or magnesium.
Put them both together, and these two could cause some serious problems for your pipes and appliances! Moreover, they also wear down the ability of a soap to clean.
But how to deal with hard water? Well, it’s simple. First, you go with a water softener!
A water softener can help you remove all the harmful minerals in water that make it hard. While they can be highly enduring, you need to take care of them if you want to ensure that they keep working effectively.
No matter how low-maintenance your water softener is, it is still necessary for you to take care of it and ensure that it keeps working well in the long run.
So, to help keep your pipes in the best possible condition, this guide will come in handy as it leans on some insights for maintaining water softeners.
A Guide to maintaining your water softener
As complicated as it may sound, maintaining your water softener happens to be much more straightforward and can help you protect your pipes from clogging up or from a potential leak!
These tips can help keep your water softener in the best shape:
- Check the salt levels of your water softener.
Salt levels play an essential role in ensuring that your softener keeps working fine.
You must check the salt levels of your water softener every two or three months. If you understand some chemistry, it will make sense why it is essential to check salt levels so frequently. Otherwise, it’s going to sound like rocket science to you.
So, the ion exchange process occurs as the sodium swaps with magnesium and reacts with calcium.
As soon as your salt levels get too low, your softener will lay back in terms of effectiveness.
So, make sure that your salt levels are always present in the correct quantity. To ensure that your water softener’s salt levels are in suitable condition, you can lift the lid to the brine tank.
You must see that the sale pellets are at enough height to cover all the water that you can see in the tank.
However, if you find the tank low on salt, ensure that you fill it up with salt no more than ⅔. Keeping the superior numbers of salt in the tank is essential. It is also important not to overfill the tank with salt.
- Clean your Brine Tank once a year at least
Many experts of water softeners suggest that it is imperative to clean a brine tank at least once a year.
However, if you don’t clean the tank regularly, the salt may form into sludge. The whole thing can turn into a huge mess which can also cause problems for your home pipes.
So, now that we have established that cleaning the brine tank is essential. Let’s move to how a person should wash their brine tank.
Start by choosing a place for disposing of rubbish as you will need to scrape off all the dump that comes from the brine tank.
A gravel bed or a pit should do fine. After that, keep the water softener in bypass mode. Once in bypass mode, disconnect the brine tank from the valve assembly.
If it’s not too much trouble, you should consider dumping the brine tank far away from your yard so you don’t end up damaging it.
But, a brine tank is not going to be easy to carry. With that being said, you might need to take out the existing salt manually or by using a wet or a dry vacuum to clean the brine tank.
As soon as you find that the tank is empty, you can disassemble and it. Ensure to clean the brine tank using cold water and dish detergent. If you can not do that yourself, search Google for “water softener repair near me” to get some professional help.
- Break up any Salt Bridges
Salt bridges are bad news too. But what exactly is a salt bridge? According to Discount Water Softeners, a salt bridge is a hard crust developing in water in your brine tank.
Salt bridges can form up due to high humidity, temperature changes, or even choosing the wrong type of salt for your brine tank.
If you want to get rid of salt bridges, your best bet would be to take a broom handle and cautiously shove it on the surface of the salt as you apply minimal pressure.
This way, if the salt bridge gets solidified, you will be able to break it up. As soon as you locate the salt bridge, it would help to cut off the water supply to the water softener.
Again, use the broom to break the bridge and make things better in your water softener.
- Dissolve Salt Mushing
When a dissolved salt recrystallizes to form a sludge at the bottom of the tank, the experts define this factor by the name of salt mushing.
Due to this thick layer, the water cannot cycle all around the water softener, resulting in an incomplete regeneration process.
If you locate a salt bridge, but it won’t budge regardless of how hard you try, you have come across salt mushing.
To get rid of your water softener from salt mush, you will need to drain the softener. After that, you should focus on digging out all the old salt and add fresh salt to replace the old salt.
However, getting rid of salt mushing will require you to follow the same process as cleaning the brine tank.
Moreover, if your water includes elements such as sediment, sand, iron, clay, or other similar factors, your water softener is likely to take a severe beating without a pre-filter.
The presence of these elements may result in clogs, and in some cases, severe damage as well.
Through a pre-filter, you will be able to remove all such impurities from the water before they even make their way to the water softener. Now, it’s most likely that a water softener will have a pre-filter.
If your water softener does not, you must get one imminently if you further want to save on bills and time.
Final Words
Following these water maintenance tips for your water softeners will surely bring out the best results for you. Additionally, you will also notice that maintenance will extend their life as well.
However, even after doing these seven fixes, your water softener isn’t performing well. You should imminently seek the help of a water softener professional.
Author bio
About Ashley Rosa: Ashley Rosa is a freelance writer and blogger. As writing is her passion that why she loves to write articles related to the latest trends in technology and sometimes on health-tech as well. She is crazy about chocolates. You can find her at twitter: @ashrosa2.
