And here I thought all I had left to do was just change the Brine Refill time -- silly me.
Reach4: Here is another number to throw into your math: the specific gravity of saturated brine is about 1.18. . . .
From an operational point of view, you will do better with an empirical approach. Get yourself a good hardness test, such as the Hach 5B, you can try reducing the brine fill a bit, and monitor the hardness toward the end of the cycle. There are soap-based tests too, but the Hach 5B is better at giving you a 1-drop/grain titration. You can trigger a manual regen if hardness gets higher early. But this experiment will cancel out the variations of things like the resin, whether your system delivers 0.50 or 0.54 or 0.48 GPM during brine refill. So if you take on optimizing salt use vs effective softening, that measuring will be effective at tuning reality. Now that test will probably cost the same as maybe 250 pounds of salt, so the payoff may take a while. But it doubles as a cheap hobby.
Be glad you are not paying yourself by the hour.
OK, Reach4, you have definitely got me in over my head now. I did look through the Densities of Saturated Solutions by the Geological Survey guys, and I think I will set that one aside for now, at least until I figure out all of this other stuff.
And as for the empirical approach, I might give that a shot. Someone, might have been you, but I don't remember, suggested the Hatch 5B test kit and I do have one of them on order.
Gary: BTW, you don't want to change any settings on the pin wheel other than to set the correct salt dose minutes. And to do that you should unplug the control and take the wheel off (and to put it back on) the timer without bending the contact finger.
OK, Gary, probably good advice. Now if I just knew what to change the Fill time to. By the way, the .25 gpm figure I gave you off of the Brine Draw/Fill line, is that for both directions. I had originally been thinking Fill, but have been reading how important that it is to have the Brine introduced into the resin tank slowly, and it got me wondering if the .25 gpm is for both ways -- which means that if it runs for 30 minutes during the Fill cycle, it must take 30 minutes for the Draw / Slow Rinse cycle -- is that right.
Which is another figure I was going to ask about -- like is there kind of an established ratio between the Brine Draw and the Slow Rinse times.
Correct, and to get to 26% it usually takes 2 hours but in some environments it takes 3 hours after the refill water is added to the salt tank. That is important to only Pre Refilled softeners, meaning the first cycle position of a regeneration is Refill. Most softener control valves do not have that feature and are Post Refill, meaning the water for the next regeneration is added at the end of the previous regeneration and the water has at least 24 hours to dissolve the salt, or get to 26^ brine.
Ron, when ya get done with the saturation thingy of the brine in the salt tank, ya should get into what it is in the drain line water during slow rinse/brine draw, that is what really matters to the successful regeneration of the resin.
OK Gary, thanks for the info. I was wondering about those systems that started out the Regeneration cycle by re-filling the Brine tank first -- didn't sound right to me. By the way, thanks for the link to the Kenmore water softener animation -- it is really cute and well done (and I think that guy started off with a fill of the Brine tank).
And yes, my next task is to understand the grain stuff -- how much the salt solution will remove, the capacity of the resin, and all that good stuff. I will likely have some more questions, but there IS A LOT of stuff out there about Grains -- so I will study that further before asking questions.
I want to thank all of you for helping me through this. I have been able to determine my Controller is working -- and I have decided that all I probably need to do at this point is to replace the resin (to get rid of the Bacteriostatic stuff). But I do want re-adjust the operation of my system AND size a bigger system for the day that I need to replace the one I have now -- either because something does happen to it or if I just want to get a more efficient system.
I still don't understand this business about the water level (i.e. I am sure I used to be able to see water with the salt level higher than it is now (although I am beginning to doubt myself there because I don't see how anything could have caused that) -- which caused me to believe my system was broken -- BUT I don't want to go into that right now -- maybe later I or you can help me speculate on that. Thanks again. ron in round rock
