Eric Wesson
New Member
Thought I'd troll a little with the thread title. Follows is a partial answer to the question.
I want to set up my church's kitchen with a softener. I browsed craigslist and found a Kenmore ... price is right, $0. I got the thing home and started inspecting it, and pleasantly surprised it looks near new. It should work okay for the kitchen, which won't use much water anyway, but after partial disassembly I came up with a few observations why anyone even halfway serious about a water softener should avoid such units.
The features are generally pretty good. There is control over the various cycle times, and a "salt level" estimator that ostensibly tells you how much salt is in the tank without lifting the lid. Should you lift the lid, there's a little LED to illuminate the interior. It has two salt dose modes, one regular (I didn't figure out how many lbs/cf that is) and the other a California high efficiency (which I think I calculated to be 3 lb/cf). I'm pretty sure it's upflow; it's got a "97% regen" variable brining option. A few other odds and ends like a pre-regen backwash (sort of strange to be an option).
Inside the outer shell / brine tank is a more-or-less normal fill-drain-overflow valve mechanism for the brine tank. No bottom screen to hold the salt up. The 3/8 poly tube awkwardly comes through a hole in the housing to the valve. Fasteners holding that stuff together are mostly nylon and some stainless steel. The valve sits on top of a 9x40 fiberglass resin tank.
Inside the head there are some critical differences. Instead of O-rings on plungers, the valve has a rotating disc, with what appears to be teflon against teflon. The disc is actually highlighted as a "wear item" on the parts diagram. Single handle faucets have similar discs, but they're ceramic. Fortunately for me, this softener's disc looks to be almost new; it's a design that should work well, but for how long, and how much does it cost to repair after it wears out?
The real problem, though, I found when I put water in it. Brine seeps out the bottom. It turned out the outer housing had cracked, probably from moving the whole unit. The bottom is not tough enough to withstand being moved with the resin tank full of water and a hundred pounds of salt in the outer tank. The plastic is thick, probably 1/8 inch, but there's a lot of weight on any one point if the softener is moved. The softener can handle being moved when it's empty of water and salt, but once it's in place it had better stay put.
The outer shell is HDPE; with a temperature controlled heat gun and a hot knife, I managed to weld a repair on the crack, using soda bottle caps (also HDPE) as the welding stick. Hooked it all back up, and we're good to go.
This is the problem with these units. A small failure in the brine tank plastic would make most people scrap the softener. Similarly, wear on the valve disc - who's going to repair it? Made as all one unit, if any one part fails, it all goes. They could make the design sturdy enough to last and be worth repairing, but they don't.
Welcome to our throwaway culture. At least this one will live a little longer.
I want to set up my church's kitchen with a softener. I browsed craigslist and found a Kenmore ... price is right, $0. I got the thing home and started inspecting it, and pleasantly surprised it looks near new. It should work okay for the kitchen, which won't use much water anyway, but after partial disassembly I came up with a few observations why anyone even halfway serious about a water softener should avoid such units.
The features are generally pretty good. There is control over the various cycle times, and a "salt level" estimator that ostensibly tells you how much salt is in the tank without lifting the lid. Should you lift the lid, there's a little LED to illuminate the interior. It has two salt dose modes, one regular (I didn't figure out how many lbs/cf that is) and the other a California high efficiency (which I think I calculated to be 3 lb/cf). I'm pretty sure it's upflow; it's got a "97% regen" variable brining option. A few other odds and ends like a pre-regen backwash (sort of strange to be an option).
Inside the outer shell / brine tank is a more-or-less normal fill-drain-overflow valve mechanism for the brine tank. No bottom screen to hold the salt up. The 3/8 poly tube awkwardly comes through a hole in the housing to the valve. Fasteners holding that stuff together are mostly nylon and some stainless steel. The valve sits on top of a 9x40 fiberglass resin tank.
Inside the head there are some critical differences. Instead of O-rings on plungers, the valve has a rotating disc, with what appears to be teflon against teflon. The disc is actually highlighted as a "wear item" on the parts diagram. Single handle faucets have similar discs, but they're ceramic. Fortunately for me, this softener's disc looks to be almost new; it's a design that should work well, but for how long, and how much does it cost to repair after it wears out?
The real problem, though, I found when I put water in it. Brine seeps out the bottom. It turned out the outer housing had cracked, probably from moving the whole unit. The bottom is not tough enough to withstand being moved with the resin tank full of water and a hundred pounds of salt in the outer tank. The plastic is thick, probably 1/8 inch, but there's a lot of weight on any one point if the softener is moved. The softener can handle being moved when it's empty of water and salt, but once it's in place it had better stay put.
The outer shell is HDPE; with a temperature controlled heat gun and a hot knife, I managed to weld a repair on the crack, using soda bottle caps (also HDPE) as the welding stick. Hooked it all back up, and we're good to go.
This is the problem with these units. A small failure in the brine tank plastic would make most people scrap the softener. Similarly, wear on the valve disc - who's going to repair it? Made as all one unit, if any one part fails, it all goes. They could make the design sturdy enough to last and be worth repairing, but they don't.
Welcome to our throwaway culture. At least this one will live a little longer.
