help! dirty water and slight iron smell

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Eliteconcept

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Ok so heres an interesting one, well maybe maybe not... I had a new water softener installed earlier this year in March, a Fleck 7000 sxt 1.5 cubic of resin. Softener was configured to regen every 7 days. Everything has been good until this past week or so. I've noticed the toilet water, even right after scrubbing and cleaning the toilet, appears dirty? i guess dirty is the right word, maybe its yellowish water, right after flushing it. Flush it and leave the water sit for a few hours and it looks like someone took a pee and didn't flush. Suspecting that perhaps it was time to change the whole house sediment water filter I did that this evening. It had been exactly 3 months since i last changed it. After doing so I ensured i had salt in my softener and manually ran a regeneration on it. The salt level was down from the last time I had checked it a few weeks back. After the regen completed I cleaned and flushed the toilets several times. Toilet still fills up with seemingly cloudy water. I also noted that water from a couple of the bathroom faucets has a more than usual iron smell to it.
I made sure my shutoff main valves are in the right position and not allowing any unsoftened water to pass by. Everything looks legit and good, but still getting cloudy water and a slight iron smelling water.

of note too perhaps, I've been using res-care cleaner in the softener religously every week since getting it installed. I maybe have missed 2 or 3 weeks of putting the res-care cleaner in, for the most part I've put it in every week. Also I'm using some salt with rust remover currently.

also all pipes in my house are copper.
 
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Reach4

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What is your iron, manganese, pH and hardness?
 

LLigetfa

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IMHO a softener should not be used to remove iron, that is the job of an iron filter. Softeners can deal with small amounts of iron and there are salt formulations with cleaning additives to remove the iron fouling from the resin. It sounds like your softener was removing iron in the beginning up until the resin got fouled.
 

Eliteconcept

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I took a sample of water to a local softener supplier this morning. They've been kind enough to do testing for me in the past. They did the hardness test and he said, it was soft nothing to be concerned with there. He tested for iron. He said it had a bit of iron in it, maybe 1 part if that. These were done via dropper tests they have. so it sounds like this 1 part or approximately 1 part of iron is the cause of my issue?
 

Reach4

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"1 part" of iron? 1 ppm is quite a bit. 0.3 ppm is where people usually draw the line. 1ppm into the softener is doable. But 1 ppm out of a softener is bad.

Get a lab test of your raw water. I like kit 90 from http://www.karlabs.com/watertestkit/

Figure 2 weeks from when you order, which includes 2 trips through the mail.
 

Eliteconcept

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Thanks for the info on the water test. Sounds like something I'll need to do to get this figured out. Just out of curiosity, given that there is likely what would be called a substantial amount of iron in the water. I'm assuming i'm going to then likely require some huge greensand system? :( of which would be incredibly hard to fit into my already cramped utility room
 
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LLigetfa

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I wonder if the guy doing the test is competent and also what test he ran. I think some tests will only detect the iron prior to it being converted into iron oxide.
 

Eliteconcept

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All i can tell you is he poured some water i brought in with me, into a small tube. then used dropper to drop 1 drop at a time into the tube. when it changed color he stopped doing drops. both hardness and iron didn't take more than 1 drop i believe
 

Mialynette2003

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Most makers of resin say do not put a softener on water that contains over 1 ppm of iron. It sounds to me that you took a sample of soften water to be tested. if so, 1 ppm of iron after the softener means you have quite a bit before the softener and as mentioned before, an iron filter is needed before the softener.
 

ditttohead

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I assume you had a water test prior to installing the softener. Can you post the results. If you did not then please get a real test completed. Kar labs kit 90 or ntllabs.com both have great kits for a reasonable price.

Without a real test I can only guess and as stated earlier, 1 ppm of iron exiting a softener is very high! No softener should pass though a softener. A softener can be used for iron reduction but it is a very poor choice. Compensated hardness, poor efficiency, fouled resin etc. will usually occur fairly quickly in many applications. Fouled resin is very common in higher pH water. That is why the resin cleaner is used, it is simply an acid. You may want to try something a lot stronger.

If the resin is excessively fouled you may want to simply replace it and install an appropriate iron reduction system ahead of the softener.
 
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