Yellow pieces of softener salt

[swlred]

I just used a bag of water softener salt, and as I was pouring it into the brine tank I noticed there were a few pieces of salt with yellow on them. Does anyone know what might be causing the yellow color? Is it a cause for concern? See the picture below. It seems like most pieces with yellow have embedded particles in them, perhaps they are bits of rust that might be causing the discoloration?

Anyway, this is a quality brand of salt, supposed to be 99.6+% pure. I've been using it for a few years and have never seen this before.

 

[Bannerman]

We may be able to better offer suggestions if we knew the brand, salt type and whether there are any additives such as an acid to assist with cleaning the resin when there is iron present in the raw water.

supposed to be 99.6+% pure

Which signifies up to 0.4% may be non-salt contaminants. For every 1000 lbs added to your brine tank, there can be 4 lbs of foreign matter that will likely not dissolve but may have accumulated and will need to be cleaned out manually.

If the salt had spent any time outdoors including being transported in uncovered trucks or rail cars, anything in the atmosphere may have entered such as soot, aviation fuel, pollen, insects, bird droppings ...

 

[Sponsor]

 

[swlred]

Thanks very much for the reply! I agree there is 0.4% of junk in the salt. It's just never been yellow before.

The salt is Kinetico brand, sold by a local Kinetico dealer, but to the best of my knowledge it is actually private label/rebranded Cargill Dura-Cube salt (that's what the dealer told me, and I called the Cargill distributor to confirm this a few years ago). I don't think there are any additives in it, at least none are listed on the SDS.

 

[ditttohead]

very common to have weird things in the salt. Salt tends to be very different regionally since it is expensive to ship. Much of the solar salt in southern California comes from Guerro Negro. So I have every confidence my salt has a small amount of impurities from the birds flying overhead.

 

[Otto Mation]

All I know is that if you see snow that looks like that......do not eat it.