Some Like It Soft

This is yet another one of my do-it-yourself adventures, like last Christmas’s refrigerator saga.

It’s dark already, and I’m just now getting around to writing today’s Journal entry.

That’s because I spent the whole day — in fact, the past three days — working on our house’s water softener.

Our water softener was about a year old when we bought this house 5 1/2 years ago. It has always worked fine.

But a few days ago, something went wrong.

We suddenly lost a whole lot of water pressure and volume. If we turned on a faucet, it would blast out normally for about 20 seconds, then quickly fade into a stream the size of a pencil. If we turned it off and waited a few minutes, it would give us another blast of water before going back to a trickle again.

But if I turned the water softener’s bypass valve, our unsoftened water had plenty of volume and pressure.

So I ran the softener through three separate 90-minute regeneration cycles, to see if that would “clean it out” and solve the problem.

It didn’t.

So I ran the softener through several more regeneration cycles and partial regeneration cycles, so that I could watch and learn what it was doing in each stage.

That’s when I discovered that, during its “brine rinse” stage, instead of sucking salt water into the resin tank from its brine tank, it was actually blowing more water into the brine tank, which caused the brine tank to overflow and then to stay full of water at all times.

Knowing that it would cost several hundred dollars to have a plumber work on it, I decided to try to fix it myself. I figured that I could always call a plumber afterward, if I couldn’t fix it myself.

Since I knew nothing at all about water softeners 3 days ago, it turned out to be quite a daunting task.

I spent hours and hours at dozens of Web sites:

• Figuring out what make and model our unmarked water softener is. (It’s the highly respected Fleck 5600 Econominder.)
• Troubleshooting the possible causes for our loss of water pressure.
• Finding and carefully studying exploded parts diagrams of our water softener’s various mechanisms.

I started disassembling our water softener at 8:30 this morning. At first, I took apart the main valve and noticed that the edges of its seals looked kind of chewed. I carefully cleaned everything and reassembled it.

The good news was that my disassembly and reassembly didn’t break anything else. The bad news was that they also didn’t fix the problem.

So I disassembled different parts and reassembled them, hoping to find the combination of cleaning, blowing through things, and generally moving everything around that would make it all work together the way it’s supposed to work. Each time I finished reassembling the whole system, I vacuumed out the overflowing brine tank before testing the whole system and finding out that it still wasn’t working correctly.

At 1:00 PM, with no end in sight, I called the local plumbing store and made an appointment for a real water softener repair person to come and fix it tomorrow afternoon.

Then I kept working on it, hoping that my work would at least save the repair person some time, thus saving me some money.

I eventually took all of the softener’s main mechanisms apart, cleaned every jet, pin, valve and opening, and reassembled them all. And I drove back and forth to the local plumbing store to buy:

• New chloramine-resistant main valve piston seals and spacers to replace my old, chewed-looking, non-resistant ones.
• A new brine valve.
• A 1-cubic-foot bag of resin, to replace what I suspected was old, clogged resin in my resin tank, caused by the chlorine and other chemicals that the city puts in our water.

I also took apart and cleaned all of the brine tank’s components and also cleaned the entire brine tank itself. That’s when I discovered that the float ball in a cage at the bottom of the brine tank’s intake/supply tube was sticking to the bottom of its cage, which prevented the softener’s main control mechanism from sucking any brine out of the brine tank during its “brine rinse” stage. So I removed the supply tube/float cage assembly and took it to the plumbing store, where they cut the float cage in half, removed the float ball, and cemented the float cage back together, free of charge. But when I came home and reinstalled it, I discovered that even without the float ball plugging the supply opening, the softener’s main control valve was still blowing additional water into the brine tank when it was supposed to be sucking brine out of it.

When you don’t know what you’re doing, trial and error is sometimes your only choice. But trial and error can take a long time. And so does replacing all of the resin in the resin tank when you’ve never done it before. But I was right that our resin tank needed new resin — in contrast to the new resin, which had the consistency of a very lightweight snow cone, made up of millions of tiny, smooth, slippery, round beads, the old resin had the consistency of heavy, sticky, gelatinous sand. I could clearly see why water hadn’t been able to flow through the old resin very well.

After I replaced the resin, I reassembled our water softener for what I hoped would be the last time at around 4:30 this afternoon.

Then I ran it through another 90-minute regeneration routine. Partway through that routine, I could tell that it was finally working the way it’s supposed to, and was drawing lots of brine out of the brine tank during its “brine rinse” phase, so I excitedly called the plumbing store and cancelled tomorrow’s appointment. The plumber who I talked to was the same guy who I had dealt with all day long. He was very happy, and congratulated me for finally fixing it myself.

At 6:00, I finished cleaning up the whole area and putting away all of my tools.

Then I ran the whole system through another successful regeneration cycle, just to double-check that it was working correctly.

It was!

The chloramine-resistant main valve piston seals and spacers and the brine valve cost me $88. The cubic-foot bag of resin cost me $96. So all together, the whole job cost me about $185. In contrast, the plumbing store would have charged $400 to replace the resin, plus I’m sure they would have charged several hundred dollars more to disassemble and clean all of my water softener’s valve mechanisms and replace the main piston seals and spacers and the brine valve.

When I was testing the softener, I noticed that, even though I had installed brand new main valve piston seals and spacers, it was still hard to turn the softener’s control knob, especially at the beginning of the “brine rinse” stage (exactly as described here). So, to make it run smoother right now, as well as to prevent future problems, I’m going to go back to the plumbing store tomorrow, to buy a brand new main valve piston. Now that I know what I’m doing, it will only take a few minutes to install it.

I’m not looking forward to standing up after I finish typing this, because I’m really, really tired and really sore.

But it’s worth it, because now our very soft water gushes out of the faucets at full blast again, like it’s supposed to.

And I saved hundreds of dollars and learned more about water softeners than I ever thought I would know.

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This entry was posted on Monday, December 7th, 2009 at 9:23 pm.