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Q My water softener isn’t softening the water. It’s not using salt, but the motor continues to run. How do I get it working again?
A There are some simple reasons why a water softener malfunctions, but first let’s briefly review how it works. Untreated water enters the brine tank and becomes saturated with sodium (salt). The sodium-saturated water then enters the resin tank, where millions of tiny polystyrene beads attract the sodium molecules and the extra salt water is purged. The brine tank is refilled and unsoftened water enters the resin tank, where the minerals that make water hard—calcium and magnesium—trade places with the sodium and attach themselves to the beads until there are no more sodium molecules to make the trade. At this point, the cycle starts over when the water softener regenerates by scrubbing the hard minerals off the beads and draining the wastewater. To get your soft water flowing again, here are three fixes you can easily perform.
Five Steps For Keeping Your Softener HealthyUse pure salt with iron remover. Standard rock salt is less expensive, but the contaminants it contains will cost you more in the long run. Rock salt can cause inches of sediment to build up in the brine tank and the sediment can clog the injector and the softener’s control valve.
- Don’t add salt until almost all the salt in the tank is used up. Then refill the tank no more than two-thirds full.
- Use Iron-Out once a year to clean the resin bed and the parts in the control valve.
Clean the brine tank once a year. Even pure salt contains contaminants.
- Make sure the softener’s drain line isn’t pushed down into a floor drain. The end of the softener’s drain line should be above the grate of the drain to prevent accidental siphoning of sewage into the softener.
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