Can someone please tell me as to how I might determine the model and serial number of my Osmonic Autotrol water softener? I’m hoping that you’ll be able to tell me how, since I think your company originally manufactured it.  On the back of the black plastic frame/case where all of the electronics are located there is a rectangular label with rounded corners which reads “Osmonics Autotrol”. There is other information on the label but it is smaller and harder to read. Am I looking in the right place for the water softeners manufacturer information? Please advise.

Answer: The label you mention will tell you what type of valve it is, but it won’t tell you who supplied the water softener. Water softeners are like cars; for instance, Ford makes the car – but they did not make the dashboard – they just put the car together and sold it to the consumer.

Same with your water softener – the valve is made by GE/Osmonics/Autotrol – but Autotrol sells the valve to many other smaller OEM companies (like us), that then assemble and sell the softener directly to the consumer.  Unfortunately, many companies do not put a manufacturer label on the water softener at all.  Your job is to identify the company that sold the unit – and this may not be possible if you do not have any sales receipt information.  If you have any information specific to the purchase available, we will search our customer database, and see if we manufactured the unit or not.  Hope this helps!

I think we have iron bacteria. There is a stringy material that forms reddish brown stains in the toilet bowl, occasional sulfur odor and bad taste.  Iron test of 4.0 GPG, hardness 6.0, ph 7.5 units.  What system would you recommend?  Someone recommended the Pyrolox Fleck 2510 iron-sulfur-manganese.

Answer: Pyrolox won’t work for an iron bacteria problem, and from your description, that seems to be your issue.  The problem with Pyrolox will be that the iron bacteria colony will start to grow within the Pyrolox media bed, and this eventually leads to bed failure.  You cannot use an automatic backwashing filter system to treat for this problem.

If your iron is present as iron bacteria, then chemical injection is recommended. You would also install a backwashing carbon filter after the injection system to remove any added chlorine. 

A liquid chlorination injection system meters liquid chlorine right into your water supply.  This system is composed of a chemical feed pump, static mixer, solution storage tank and retention tank.  When your well pump comes on, the chemical feed pump adds chlorine solution into the static mixer (which aids in the uniform mixing process) and enters the retention tank where the disinfection/oxidation process occurs.

A chemical injection system includes the following:
a. Stenner 15 gallon STS solution storage & chemical feed pump system
b. 80 gallon retention tank
c. In-line static mixer

You typically use a starting mix of 1/2 gallon household chlorine bleach to the 15 gallon chemical solution tank to start.  You then vary the pump feed rate until you obtain the desired residual chlorine concentration (about 0.5 ppm free chlorine) – typically a setting of 50% works well.  You can obtain a chlorine test kit locally from most plumbing supply stores (and many pool supplies) – they are very inexpensive.

If you inject chlorine into your water you should always incorporate a backwashing carbon filter into your system.  The filter would be installed after the chemical injection equipment, and will remove any injected chlorine, and also filter out the oxidized iron.  Our model CF15-M, 1.5 ft3 automatic backwashing carbon filter (Autotrol 263/440i valve and control) is available online also.  Carbon filters require that the filter media be replaced every two to four years at a cost of approximately $150.00. The carbon filter would be placed after the chlorination injection equipment and holding tank.

You can read more about this equipment online at http://www.caitechnologies.com – enter the Water Treatment Systems area, and click on the “Chemical Feed Systems” or “Filters & pH Neutralizers” (carbon filter) drop-down under the Online Store menu.

I have an Autotrol water softener. After a regen the water level in the brine tank is not coming back up to the level it was at before the regen with the result that I have to refill it manually. Any ideas on the cause? Thank you in advance.

Answer:  From your previous post it seems that you have an Autotrol Logix 255.  These controls come in two versions – the 760 and the 762.  In the 760 programming, you can set a High salt setting of 15 pounds salt per ft3 resin, a Standard setting of 9 pounds, and a Low setting of 3.5 pounds.  1 cubic foot is equal to 32,000 grains exchange capacity, and 3 pounds of salt dissolve into a gallon of water.  So if we assume that you have a 32K softener, then you would have a refill of 5 gallons, 3 gallons, or about 1 gallon.

The other version (762) allows you to set the salt to your specific preference, but if you do not adjust this setting, then you will have the default 9 pounds, and a refill of 3 gallons.

If the refill volume matches these setting, then you may be adding too much water unnecessarily.  If the unit is not refilling enough, check to see if your injector or injector screen is plugged again.  Hope this helps!

We have been having problems with our septic system and disconnected the softener drain hose and temporarily attached it to a pipe that runs into the back yard.  When the softener regenerates, we have large amounts of white substance left on the lawn.  When I pull the hose back inside, it leaves a trail of this powdery stuff behind.  Is this normal?  We are having to replace several feet of our plumbing because of backup and find white calcium deposits inside the pipes.  Is this softener the culprit?

Answer:  We just found this one unpublished – please remember to hit the “Publish” button when posting everyone!  Anyway, the material you notice is a combination of scale (hardness including calcium and magnesium that was removed from your household water), and salt used to regenerate the water softener resin bed.   When you say you had to replace “several feet of piping” do you mean drain piping? If so, it is normal to find this material in the drain.  If you are talking about piping downstream of the water softener, there should be no buildup of a whitish deposit there – this would indicate that your water softener is not functioning properly.

I would like to have a better understanding of how to determine the amount of salt required to regenerate a water softener. I recently purchased an 80,000 grain softener because my water is about 50 GPG hardness.

When the softener is regenerated, the water measures 0 GPG, and stays that way until I have used about 1100 gallons. At 1125 gallons, it measures 2 GPG and at 1175 gallons it measures 13 GPG. The current brine setting fills the brine tank for 20 minutes at a rate of 0.5 gpm, for a total of 10 gallons of brine, which should dissolve 30 pounds of salt.

When the 80,000 grains of softening capacity is fully depleted, the water would be measuring 50 GPG of hardness, but I want the softener to regenerate as soon as the water starts to get hard, about 1-2 GPG. How do you predict the number of gallons that can be used before this point is reached? How many pounds of salt is required to regenerate to FULLY regenerate an 80,000 gpg softener? Is my softener only yielding only 1100 gallons of 0 GPG water because 30 pounds of salt is not enough to FULLY regenerate it? Thanks! John

Answer: What you are seeing is called leakage.  As a water softener’s resin bed starts to lose its exchange capacity, the water to be treated comes into contact with less and less active resin (lower residence or contact time), and the level of hardness increases until the bed is regenerated again.  Most generic high capacity resins have 32,000 grains capacity per cubic foot.  With a 80,0000 grain water softener,  you would have 2.5 cubic feet of resin.  Maximum brining for this resin is 15 pounds sodium chloride per cubic foot – however, you can get by with using less pounds of salt per cubic foot.  Maximum brining means getting the full 32,000 grain capacity per cubic foot resin out of your resin – but this scale is not linear, it is logarithmic – and you will get most of the exchange capacity out of your unit using only a portion of this amount.  You need to use quite a bit of salt to get the remaining small amount of capacity, and this is normally not worth it in terms of salt consumption and operational efficiency.

It is typical to brine at 9 pounds of salt per cubic foot, and for a 2.5 ft3 water softener this yields a 62,500 grain capacity.  3 pounds of salt dissolve into a gallon of water, and you would need to set your unit to refill the brine tank with 7.5 gallons of water to achieve this capacity.  With 50 GPG hardness and 62,500 grains capacity, you would be able to treat 1250 gallons of water.  However, as you noted, as the bed loses activity, the level of hardness in the treated water starts to rise – this will vary with flow rate – as higher flow rates will show more leakage (less contact time at higher flow rate).

However, you are brining at 10 gallons = 30 pounds of salt, and seeing this level of leakage so soon does not really make sense unless there are other things (like iron or manganese) present in your water that you do not mention here.  If so, this would reduce the amount of water that can be treated before leakage occurs.  It is possible that the resin you are using is sub-standard, but this is not likely if you purchased the unit from a reputable business.

Basically, we would not recommend that you increase your salt setting, but instead reduce the amount of gallons metered before a regeneration occurs.  In your case, you have already measured this at 1100 gallons, and resetting the unit to this value with the same salt setting should be the way to go.  If you want to get full capacity out of your unit, brine at 12.5 gallons – no more – any more than this would just be wasting salt.