ClassicMuscle
New Member
First off, thank you for any help that you are able to provide! I have never paid much attention to our water softener before outside of filling it, but it is now having issues and I am looking for help. We bought our house approximately 10 years ago. It is on a shared well with a neighbor. The house was a foreclosure on a fairly new house that had sat empty for 5 years, so we walked in with little background. The area is known to have extremely rusty water. Our neighbor's sprinkler system has turned his driveway red. I made the mistake of letting the wind blow spray from a sprinkler onto some landscape rock in front of the house for a couple of hours and they also are stained red.
The house has what I think is a fairly unique albeit most likely wrong approach to removing the rust in the water. From what I am finding it uses a Fleck 9000 dual tank softener which then flows into a Fleck 5600 single tank softener with a Turbulator. When the system is working it does remove the rust from our water, however it is at the cost of us having a lot of salt in our water and having it slowly damage faucets, etc. When we first moved in the system was using 17 bags of salt a month. I have turned it down significantly. We now seem to run just above the point of red staining and use that amount of salt in 3 months. From what I have found so far, here are the specs:
Fleck 9000
Model #: FC-150T-9000
Meter: 3/4"
Serial #: 201100
House is piped with 3/4" pex
Fleck 5600
Model #: 4FL-1040
Meter: 5600
Serial #: 201099
Turbulator
Now for the issue. The 9000 has begun to continuously dump water at full stream out the backwash drain. We only caught it because we started to see sputters in water pressure. I believe we were just about to temporarily run our well dry. The system is located in the basement which we never go into, so we never caught the fact that it was continuously dumping for who know how long. I tried cycling it through several cycles waiting between each step however the drain never stopped running at full speed. I have opened the bypass to stop the water for now. From what I am reading on here, the most common solution is to replace the vavle body/control unit with a 9100 SXT because these 9000's have known issues. Am I jumping the gun here or would that be a prudent direction?
Also, any thoughts on the overall setup here?
Thank you for your help!
The house has what I think is a fairly unique albeit most likely wrong approach to removing the rust in the water. From what I am finding it uses a Fleck 9000 dual tank softener which then flows into a Fleck 5600 single tank softener with a Turbulator. When the system is working it does remove the rust from our water, however it is at the cost of us having a lot of salt in our water and having it slowly damage faucets, etc. When we first moved in the system was using 17 bags of salt a month. I have turned it down significantly. We now seem to run just above the point of red staining and use that amount of salt in 3 months. From what I have found so far, here are the specs:
Fleck 9000
Model #: FC-150T-9000
Meter: 3/4"
Serial #: 201100
House is piped with 3/4" pex
Fleck 5600
Model #: 4FL-1040
Meter: 5600
Serial #: 201099
Turbulator
Now for the issue. The 9000 has begun to continuously dump water at full stream out the backwash drain. We only caught it because we started to see sputters in water pressure. I believe we were just about to temporarily run our well dry. The system is located in the basement which we never go into, so we never caught the fact that it was continuously dumping for who know how long. I tried cycling it through several cycles waiting between each step however the drain never stopped running at full speed. I have opened the bypass to stop the water for now. From what I am reading on here, the most common solution is to replace the vavle body/control unit with a 9100 SXT because these 9000's have known issues. Am I jumping the gun here or would that be a prudent direction?
Also, any thoughts on the overall setup here?
Thank you for your help!