How to Care for Your Water Softener

Your water softener does a great job of taking care of your family’s water supply by keeping your clothes and hair soft and your fixtures free of calcium buildup. With all that it does for you, don’t you think you should help it out and maintain it every once in a while? All it takes is a little bit of effort to care for your water softener and keep it running well.

How to Care for Your Water Softener

Check the Brine Tank

A monthly check is a good average, factors like; the number of people in your home, your water usage, water hardness and equipment volume, you may want to check on things more or less often.  What are you looking for?

You should check the salt levels of your brine tank to ensure that they aren’t too high or low. While your manual will tell you how much salt your softener needs, typically, the tank should be half filled with salt, and the salt should be about three inches above the water. When checking the salt, make sure you break apart any clumps and stir up any mushy salt toward the bottom of the tank.

You should also make sure you’re using the right kind of salt. There are generally three different kinds — rock salt, solar salt, and evaporated salt — each with their own efficiency and price. While one may cost more than the other, the better quality salts keep your tank in better shape, longer. Choose quality here; a good clean salt will make a difference; look for 99.8% pure. 

For your Kinetico Water Softener you’ll need pellet salt.

Check it out

Literally, survey the scene.

• Look for leaks around on the ground, drips from connected pipes.
• Check the clock and time of day, accuracy (if your system regenerates on a schedule- Kinetico water softeners do not)
• Do you have an in-line filter? This is usually, but not always before your water enters the water softener. That is a filter that needs to be changed from time-to-time. If you have never changed it or can’t remember when, it might be time for a new filter; as a ballpark, 4 -6 months is an average time, again here- lots of factors affect that time range. Call your local service provider, they should be able to give your some basic information over the phone. If you buy your filters from your local service company, they’ll be able to tell you the last time the filters were changed.

Regenerating

If you’re having any doubts as to whether or not your water softener is working, regenerating it is always a good place to start.  For help regenerating, you may need to reach out to local provider.  They should be able to walk you through it over the phone, text or chat.

Clean the Tank

There are a only a few scenarios where you’d want or need to clean your brine tank. Because after all, a water softeners regeneration process is essentially cleaning it out to start the softening process over. 

• If your salt drum (brine tank) is dirty, sludgy or muddy looking
• The water level is high
• Salt isn’t going down (also called bridging)

How to:

• • Begin by shutting off the water valve and emptying the tank, removing the mesh bridge in the process.

 

• • Fill your tank with soapy water and let it soak for a few minutes before rinsing it out.

 

• • Mix ¼ cups of bleach with 2-3 gallons of water and pour the solution into your tank. Let that sit for about 15 minutes before thoroughly rinsing the tank with fresh water.

 

• Lastly, refill the tank with salt and reset it in your unit.

For more information about caring for your water softener, contact the water experts at Aquarius Water Conditioning. When you want the best water in Minnesota and Wisconsin, give us a call at 888-741-9025.