City water softener and chlorine filter

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Thetruck454

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I'm on city water and have been having hard water issues. Got water tested and of note is ~10gpg hardness and ~1.5ppm chlorine. Called the water company and they confirmed they use sodium hypochloite and target 1ppm.

I local plumbing supply place that I use has both watersoft and aquapure systems. My monthly city water bill confirms a peak monly flow of about 7 ccf or 5236 gallons monthly. Divide by 30 and multiply the hardness gives me 1745 grains a day. Tells me I need either 24,000 or 32,000 grain softener. As far as service flow rate, I have two bathrooms, one with a 2.5gpm shower. Add in the fact that I'll also run a dishwasher or washing machine at the same time I believe a 10gpm sfr would suffice.

I wanted to add chlorine filter ahead of the softener, is there a preference between a carbon filled tank or a cartridge fiter? Watersoft and aquapure both sell huge 10+gpm chlorine cartridge filters that I was thinking of puttting in vice a second tank with another automatic valve. Also appealing to my love of technology, watersoft's control valve has a Bluetooth app that gives me all sorts of control and usage statistics so I'm leaning that way with the softener at least.


Am I off base on anything or anyone have suggestions?
 

Reach4

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Tells me I need either 24,000 or 32,000 grain softener.
24000 and 32000 are not real numbers that you should use in any calculation. They are a convention for a 3/4 and 1 cubic ft softener.

I would get at least 1.5 cuft, but 1.0 would be enough. The code for 1.5 is 48000. Get 10% crosslinked resin. 1 cuft would not be bad. With 6 pounds of salt to regen, capacity would be 20,000 grains. With your numbers, 1 cuft would regenerate about every 11 days.
 
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Thetruck454

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24000 and 32000 are not real numbers that you should use in any calculation. They are a convention for a 3/4 and 1 cubic ft softener.

I would get at least 1.5 cuft, but 1.0 would be enough. The code for 1.5 is 48000. Get 10% crosslinked resin. 1 cuft would not be bad. With 6 pounds of salt to regen, capacity would be 20,000 grains. With your numbers, 1 cuft would regenerate about every 11 days.

Thanks for the info. Rule of thumb you want to size the softener to regenerate between 7 and 14 days correct?
 

Reach4

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Thanks for the info. Rule of thumb you want to size the softener to regenerate between 7 and 14 days correct?
Lower limit of 7 days is correct. Without iron, such as city water, the upper limit might be 28 days.

Gary Slusser's old page said "The SFR in gpm is: 1.0 cuft = 9, 1.25 = 10, 1.5' = 12, ...". SFR is not a hard limit and other sources might draw the line elsewhere.

10x54 is a nice and very common size. The extra cost is not that much. Floor space is not that much. However if you had a space constraint, then another choice could be good. If you like the anesthetics of 1 cuft, that counts. If you are putting this into a crawl space, that matters a lot due to vertical space and how much digging you would need to do.

One advantage to the 1 cubic ft softener is that if you ever replace the resin, the resin is cheaper. Usually to replace resin in 1.5 softener, you would be buying 1 cuft plus 0.5 cuft at an increased cost per cuft. It may be that you could get quality replacement resin from a trusted source bulk without paying the extra. You don't find 1.5 or 0.75 cuft bags.

9" x 35" 0.75 cu. ft. ( 24,000 grains )
9" x 40" 1.00 cu.ft. ( 32,000 grains )
9" x 48" 1.00 cu. ft. ( 32,000 grains )
10" x 35" 1.00 cu. ft.( 32,000 grains )
10" x 40" 1.00 cu .ft. ( 32,000 grains )
10" x 44" 1.25 cu. ft. ( 40,000 grains )
10" x 54" 1.50 cu. ft. ( 48,000 grains )
12" x 52" 2.00 cu. ft. ( 64,0000 grains )
 

ditttohead

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Bluetooth for a softener with an app... available but everybody ignores them after the first month. Do you really want to know that you used 103 gallons yesterday? Or that your system regenerated last night? The information is basically worthless, adds cost and complexity, and is more annoying than anything else. Kind of like the Bluetooth refrigerator that tells you the temperature inside is 38 degrees and the door was opened 8 times today... seriously? :)

A softener should be installed and if properly sized, the salt tank should only have to be filled once or twice a year. I usually remember to fill it about once a year when my water in the shower turns sticky...

I am not a fan of companies that take Fleck valves, run them to China to make a knockoff by the lowest bidder...

I would recommend the Aquapure, if I am not mistaken they use Clack original valves, not Chinese knockoffs.

Do not use a whole house BB carbon filter. They may flow 15 GPM but they are extremely expensive to maintain (properly) and the cost per gallon is far more. the initial cost is a little less but the long term operating cost is excessive. Carbon requires contact time for effective chlorine and organic chemical reduction. Most of the chemicals require about 3 minutes of contact for effective reduction. Chlorine is easily removed quickly... this is more of a classroom session but please just trust the experts... BB is not a good method of whole house chlorine/organic chemical reduction. he backwashing systems are by far the most cost effective and typically only need to rebedded every 5 years. The rebedding is done for sanitary reasons more than capacity reasons. You would want to go with no less than a 1.5 cubic foot system for both. The carbon tank is typically backwashed only once or twice a month and this water can be put into the garden or lawn in many municipalities, check with your local code of course. Are you looking at installing it yourself?
 

Thetruck454

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Bluetooth for a softener with an app... available but everybody ignores them after the first month. Do you really want to know that you used 103 gallons yesterday? Or that your system regenerated last night? The information is basically worthless, adds cost and complexity, and is more annoying than anything else. Kind of like the Bluetooth refrigerator that tells you the temperature inside is 38 degrees and the door was opened 8 times today... seriously? :)

That may be most people, but not me. Some people spend time talking about useless sports, financial, etc satistics. I spend my time analyzing useless statistics on every day life. You don't want to know the things I trend and graph, it's quite scary haha.


A softener should be installed and if properly sized, the salt tank should only have to be filled once or twice a year. I usually remember to fill it about once a year when my water in the shower turns sticky...
Good to know, I was under the impression that too big of a salt capacity was bad.

I am not a fan of companies that take Fleck valves, run them to China to make a knockoff by the lowest bidder...

I would recommend the Aquapure, if I am not mistaken they use Clack original valves, not Chinese knockoffs.

I was trying to find who made the watersoft valves, but I couldn't find out.


Do not use a whole house BB carbon filter. They may flow 15 GPM but they are extremely expensive to maintain (properly) and the cost per gallon is far more. the initial cost is a little less but the long term operating cost is excessive. Carbon requires contact time for effective chlorine and organic chemical reduction. Most of the chemicals require about 3 minutes of contact for effective reduction. Chlorine is easily removed quickly... this is more of a classroom session but please just trust the experts... BB is not a good method of whole house chlorine/organic chemical reduction. he backwashing systems are by far the most cost effective and typically only need to rebedded every 5 years. The rebedding is done for sanitary reasons more than capacity reasons. You would want to go with no less than a 1.5 cubic foot system for both. The carbon tank is typically backwashed only once or twice a month and this water can be put into the garden or lawn in many municipalities, check with your local code of course. Are you looking at installing it yourself?

What does BB stand for? Are you saying the large house filters are also mechanically less efficient remoiving chlorine, or they are just less cost effective?

A new whole house filter from watersoft is about $150 which is rated to 150,000 gallons so it should last over a year based on usage. How often would the carbon need to be replaced in a media tank, is 5 years a good bet? Can't I just backwash the carbon tank into the same drain as the softener?

I am installing this myself, which will involve a little bit more plumbing to separate the outside water faucets from the inside. I have a Milwaukee press tool tool that I've been dying to use so I'm going to add a lot more valves in my plumbing to make more lines isolable.(sad right?)
 

Bannerman

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What does BB stand for?
A popular line of large cartridge filters is named Big Blue.

A carbon cartridge filter system is usually not appropriate for Point of Entry use but better suited for Point of Use (single faucet) applications. There is typically not enough media contained even in the larger cartridges to allow adequate contact time for chemicals to adsorb into the carbon unless the flow velocity is quite low. Even if you are only concerned with the removal of chlorine from your entire water supply, a cartridge would generally require frequent replacement which is why he mentioned the expense.

The carbon filter that Ditttohead is advocating is a large tank, similar in size to a water softener, equipped with a backwashing head and containing no less than 1.5 cuft of bulk carbon. As carbon media can support bacterial growth over time, the usual replacement frequency is 5 years whereas the backwash frequency is typically every 2 - 4 weeks.
 
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ditttohead

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Carbon cartridges can reduce chlorine but they will struggle with anything beyond that. Carbon is an amazing filter media that reduces a plethora of contaminants. It requires contact time to work on anything other than chlorine. Chlorine reduction is very easy for carbon.
 
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