Bringing Old Softener Back to Service

[G2gGolfing]

Hello,
I newbie here, I searched for awhile and didn't see the answer so I'll ask and I apologise in advance if this question is asked frequently.

I bought a house with a softener (enting with fleck from 1998) and it was working, but it would run out of soft water very quickly (Regen every other day) and I had lots of salt residue in my water. I was advised my softener was bad and needed to be replaced. I was about to buy a new one when my neighbor offered me their old one (they connected to city water). Their softener is a ecowater 3402 from 2007ish, but has been out of service for 2 years and it was stored indoors with water in the resin.

I tore my old one out and routed copper to the new softener. Cleaned out the brine tank and then added 3-4 gallons of water with about a half a cup of bleach (heard mixed things about using bleach, but couldn't find any other way to sanitize) and then regenerated. I added salt and then ran 2 more regenerations to be sure I got all the bleach out. I just added iron out and regenerated it again. This time I had iron coming out of my drinking faucets very dark at first then lightened up. I just ran another Regen with a 2nd batch of iron out thinking the softener was just heavily fouled with iron (still running).

Is there anything else I should do? My last softener was heavily fouled with iron, but I never found it in my drinking water that dark. My next thought is to Regen using rescare.

Hardness 23 grains
Iron: 1 ppm

Softener set to 28 grains and 12 min backflush.

Thanks in advance,
Garrett

 

[G2gGolfing]

Sorry for the double post, but to clarify, I assume the iron is from the iron out and I adjusted blackflush to 15 min on 2nd run. My question is, is the iron normal after Regen with iron out and is there anything else I should do to sanitize the softener or do anything else before servicing the house with it?

 

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[ditttohead]

Not too many people on this site really like to deal with that system. The answers may be few and far between.
I will make a suggestion for future posters, remove the iron fouling prior to sanitizing as the bleach has a tendency to lock the iron onto the resin almost like a cement. Before sanitizing, the iron is easily removed, once bleach is introduced... you are dealing with difficult iron removal problem.

Other than that, clean it well, sanitize it... and good luck. Might be time to consider updating the equipment. All Softeners can handle iron, It is really not a preferred or proper method.