Plumbers in Scurry, Texas

What happens inside the salt tank

A softener does not use salt to soften water. It uses salt to rinse the hardness off its resin so the resin can work again, and that only happens if the brine tank actually contains brine.

Salt bridges are the usual fault. Salt hardens into a crust that spans the tank with a void underneath, so the water at the bottom never touches it. The unit regenerates faithfully with plain water, the resin never recovers, and hard water comes through while the tank still looks full. Push a broom handle down through it and you will know within seconds.

Mush at the bottom is the other one. Fine grades and cheap salt leave a sludge that blocks the draw and needs shovelling out, which is a genuinely unpleasant hour and the reason it never gets done.

Use a clean pelleted salt rather than the cheapest bag, keep the level somewhere above a third and below three quarters full, and open the lid every couple of months to look. That is the entire maintenance routine.

How often it should regenerate

Two kinds of control. A timer regenerates on a schedule whether the household used water or not, which wastes salt and water in a quiet house and runs out of capacity in a busy one. A metered unit regenerates based on volume used, which is what you want on hard water.

Either way the unit needs to know two numbers: the hardness of your water and how many people live in the house. Those get set at installation and then never revisited, which is why a softener set for two people is still set that way when four live there.

Regeneration timing matters too. It should happen in the small hours when nobody is drawing water, because a regeneration cycle sends hard water to the house and a tank's worth of brine to the drain.

Resin itself lasts years and does eventually finish. Where the salt is right, the settings are right and the water is still hard, the resin bed is usually the answer, and on an old unit replacing the whole softener often costs little more than rebedding it.

On a well, and how we work

Softeners on well water have an extra problem. Iron fouls resin, and a unit doing the job of an iron filter will underperform and eventually clog. Where a well carries iron, the sequence needs an iron stage ahead of the softener rather than asking one machine to do both.

It is also worth remembering where the softened water goes. Outside taps and irrigation should stay on raw water, and where a household is on septic, the brine discharge belongs where the system can tolerate it.

We test hardness, set units properly for the household, clear brine tanks, replace resin and valves, and cover Scurry, Kaufman, Crandall and Terrell.