What to Do Once Major Salt Bridging Occurs

[Will Rogers Plumbing]

I have a customer that has a Kenmore Elite Water Softener. The whole brine tank is a solid block of salt. From top to bottom. What is the best way to remove the salt, or should I just install a new water softener?

 

[Tom Sawyer]

I have a customer that has a Kenmore Elite Water Softener. The whole brine tank is a solid block of salt. From top to bottom. What is the best way to remove the salt, or should I just install a new water softener?

A combination of hot water and judicious chipping will remove it but its a POS Kenmore. If you can sell him a new unit, you should. And not another Kenmore, whirlpool or GE

 

[Sponsor]

 

[Reach4]

I think I might try increasing the brine refill to the max for a while, to see if that either washes out the salt bridge, or at least removes a lot of the salt making the hammer and chisel able to break through later.

I cleaned out my impacted salt mass in my separate brine tank several months ago. I am glad I was not paying myself by the hour. Salt is heavy. I am thinking I had 200 pounds of salt in there. I wish I had thought of trying raising the brine level to max. I did not have a salt bridge as it turns out. I feel the salt was there for many many years. The salt was fairly dirty, so maybe I was better off removing that salt. Having a separate brine tank helped. I did not have a salt grid or anything besides a plain tube; the old Autotrol has its air check as part of the controller.

I now add less salt, and keep the water level partially visible.

 

[Will Rogers Plumbing]

Wish I had a better shot, but that is what I got. The whole brine tank is a solid block of salt. It's in a basement, so maybe it is from high humidity, but also from overloading with salt. I'm planing of taking it out and installing a Fleck 5600SXT

 

[ditttohead]

Add a lot of hot water, regenerate, repeat a few times, the bridge will break up easily after a few regens.
Is that Potassium chloride? See http://www.impactwaterproducts.com/#!salt-vs-potassium/cz76

Hope this helps.

 

[NHmaster3015]

Just keep adding salt LOL A perfect example of how little folks know about their equipment. Why would you keep adding salt if the salt ain't going down? I know, its because the guy that installed it told them to add a bag every two weeks LOL

 

[Will Rogers Plumbing]

Most people do do that unfortunately. They think more salt is better.....