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Understanding Water Softener Parts and Basic Operation
So What Does A Water Softener Do?
In short, the various water softener parts work in tandem to take hardness ions out of your water. While there are many good reasons to do so, the main two reasons are extending the life of your plumbing and saving the quality of your clothing. The hardness ions in hard water create was is commonly referred to as “lime.” This substance causes scaling in your pipes, making your whole system more prone to clogging and build up of bad smells. Additionally, hard water has a nasty habit of ruining clothing over only a few wash cycles, so it wastes quite a bit of money for people every year. As a result, it is best to get a water softener in order to avoid costly repair bills that could have been avoided.
Taking a look inside the typical water softener, you’ll see that there is a resin bed that usually contains a number of tiny beads or something similar. This material is coated in sodium ions, ready to soften the water. When the hard water comes into the system, there is swap of ions, with the hardness ions leaving the water and attaching to the resin bed and the sodium ions doing just the opposite. Since sodium (salt) ions dissolve very easily in water compared to magnesium and calcium, the result is far softer water that doesn’t leave the nasty residue, avoiding the clogs and clothing damage typical of a hard water environment.
The Process of Regeneration
After a certain amount of time passes, the sodium ions in the resin bed will eventually run out, requiring more to take their place. The process that achieves this is referred to “regeneration.” In this step, salt water passes back into the resin bed from a part called the “brine tank.” As the salt water moves through the resin beads, they get recoated, ready to soften water once again. Remember, if the regeneration process isn’t functioning properly and the resin bed is exhausted, your water softener is having no positive effect on your water!
The 3 Most Important Water Softener Parts
To conclude, here are the 3 parts you really ought to be familiar with on a basic level:
The Resin Tank - As described before, this is the part that contains the negatively charged sodium ion beads. This is where the hardness is taken out of the water by trading out the positively charged hardness ions. In a portable water softener, this part is generally much smaller and can probably be refilled with table salt.
The Brine Tank – Remember, this is the part that contains the salt water which will eventually get backwashed through the resin bed in order to recharge it with sodium ions.
The Control Valve – I didn’t mention this one before, but you should be familiar with its basic function as the softener’s first point of entry for water. It will often have a maintenance mode where you can stop the flow of water into the softener while you fix anything that has gone wrong.
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