Autotrol 440 Day Selection

[Reach4]

On the Autotrol 440 controller timer shown, "DAY" points to pin 3. Which pin determines what happens tonight at 2 AM? Is it 3 or is it 4? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWTJ0peoC10 says it would be pin 4. The instruction manual had caused me to think it would be pin 3, but it is not explicit.

Why not just try it? It's trickier to detect than it sounds without watching it at 2 AM.

 

[Mialynette2003]

It would be pin 4. The tripper arm moves counter clockwise so when it contacts the day wheel, the pin contacts the regen actuator gear to start a regen. Pin 3 is past the actuator gear.

 

[Sponsor]

 

[Gary Slusser]

ummm you can change the time of day to just before 2am and watch what happens over the next few minutes but... the Day is usually used to index the pin wheel numbers dial to and usually you would pull all steel pins out (toward you) and then rotate the dial to put #1 at Day and then push in (away from you) the steel pins that you want a regeneration to occur on. I.E. every other day, every day or every 6th day etc..

In the picture, at midnight the arm on the timer dial will catch the #5 plastic part on the skipper wheel and over the next 2 hrs, rotate the pin wheel to position #4 at the Day location. Then, if #4 pin is pushed in, it trips a gear inside the timer and that gear will rotate and that will start a regeneration (at 2am). The steel pins (that are pushed in) are tripping a gear inside the timer that causes rotation of the flapper valve cam shaft behind the timer.

 

[Reach4]

Thanks both of you. I have a backwashing filter set to regen every three days, and the softener set to go every 6 for now. So I was trying to make sure these regens would not overlap. Since I was thinking wrong before, there was a 50% chance that I would put the softener regen on the same night as the filter regen. Fortunately, while I was regenerating on a different night than I was thinking, it turns out I still was doing it on separate nights. I have a spreadsheet to track the schedule that I could use to put things back in phase if there was a power outage. I know I did not need the spreadsheet, but the spreadsheet was easy. It also predicts when the solution tank needs refilling.

To detect when a regen had occurred, I had ground down a steel washer to fit in the horizontal slot of the red knob. The thinking was that the washer would fall out as that knob rotated through a regen. Somehow it seemed it would fall out even when there was no regen. (The washer has a string so I don't have to search for it.) I will re-try that test. Maybe it was doing OK but I had only thought it had fallen out early.

 

[Gary Slusser]

The best and maybe only way to prevent same night and/or same time is to set the time on the filter/softener off by like 10 minutes longer than the backwash/regeneration will take. If just back washing a filter 45 minutes, if regenerating 90 minutes. If you have a low producing well you might want 3-4 hrs between them.