Brine tank, 10 years in use ....

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ENIGMA-2

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I finally got around to cleaning the brine tank today, it has been in continuous use for ten years.

I have used Diamond Sun Gems pellets with Red Out from the beginning.

I was very surprised to see very little dirt in in tank, a couple pieces of plastic salt wrapper, a piece of plastic from something (have no idea, doubt it came from the softener). The remaining layer of salt was packed into a thin, dense layer about an inch thick, but broke up easily.

I allowed the salt level to drop to the dense salt layer (took several months) and then used a wet/dry vac to suck out the salt and dirt.

Took about 20 minutes. Good testament to the cleanness of the salt. Probably could have gone another 10 years from what little dirt I saw.
 

ditttohead

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Some processed salts are excellent, even some solar salts are great. The worst tends to be when people use the cheap road salt... ugh. Mined salt tends to be a little nasty too. Regardless, salt tanks should be cleaned every 5 years just to do a nice a simple sanitization. Like you noted, it was quick, easy and painless.
 

Maxwelhse

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My Dad has been the owner-operator of a 6 bay self-service car wash (with 17' tall bays for trucks and buses) and has had 3 Kinetico home-grade softeners in use since 1988 (at the time, Kinetico didn't manufacture any commercial softeners [perhaps they still don't?], so they told him to just run more of them). They have never had their brine tanks cleaned or any indication that they needed to.

Also... A former co-worker of mine was sort of a gadget guy and always wanted to the latest and greatest stuff whenever any excuse presented itself... He began having some problems with his Kinetico (bought new in... oddly enough... 1988) in 2009 and rather than repair it decided to replace it in entirety. Right about then I was buying my house and some unknown brand softener in it that was leaking everywhere. He deinstalled his Kinetico and gave it to me for free. I took the unit and the brine tank over to Dad's carwash to give it all a bath before taking it in to the Kinetico dealer for service ($90 repair bill, btw) and found absolutely no build up of any kind inside the brine tank. It was totally clean before I started (I just knocked a bunch of cobwebs and spider eggs off of all of it).

Also... The Kinetico dealer while inspecting it thought that I had already hand the tanks rebedded because the resin was in such good shape.

Common theme? All 4 softeners have always run on good, clean, salt (usually says something like "hardy-cube" or "absolutely pure" on the bags).

We have a total of 9 Kineticos in the family and none of them have ever had their brine tanks cleaned or have been rebedded (and, again, 3 of them have been in commercial use for almost 30 years). Run good salt and keep garbage out of it!

And... I think the last time we bought a pallet (2500lbs?) of GOOD salt it was something like $800. 2500lbs of salt would run my house for about 3 years so it's not all that expensive to buy the good stuff.
 

ditttohead

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No real secrets, clean salt will keep a brine tank clean, but... in a potable application, common sense dictates that intermittent cleaning is a good idea. Salt tanks are not a friendly environment for most biological issues so they tend to stay fairly sanitary, that is why more frequent sanitization is not needed. And stories of 30 years do no justify not cleaning a brine tank.

An old guy looked at me like I was crazy when I recommended some water filtration for his house in Brawley California. He told me he had been drinking the water from the canals for 50 years... as we were talking a crop duster flew over the canal about 50 yards up dumping its load on the field, the canal, and everything else... he simply smiled and scooped up a handful of water and drank it...

Water softener valves and resin can last for many years, most units life expectancy are directly related to chlorine levels in the water. Higher chlorine levels will break down resin over time. I have pulled apart many 30+ year old softeners where the resin was still functioning just fine. Nothing unusual there. We almost always found the chlorine levels to be fairly low and the resin quality very high. Unfortunately, most companies are trying to be $1 cheaper than the next guy on the internet, resin quality, internal components, knock off valves, cheaper tanks etc all come into play when trying to be the cheapest.
 

Reach4

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Higher chlorine levels will break down resin over time. I have pulled apart many 30+ year old softeners where the resin was still functioning just fine. Nothing unusual there. We almost always found the chlorine levels to be fairly low and the resin quality very high.
Nice!
 
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