Suddenly our Kenmore 44,000 grain softener is barely softening our well water. It has enough salt and I ran a regen cycle thinking that maybe we used too much water and ran out of soft water, with the same results very hard water with minimal softening – it is softening a little.
The well water is of very poor quality 100 grains hardness, 1800 ppm TDS, 1498 ppm sulfides, no iron, ph near 7. We inject hydrogen peroxide into the water stream as it is pumped out of the well into a storage tank where the water sits several days. The water usually has no smell and every now and then a slight odor of sulfide so I assume the injector pump is doing its job. The softener was doing OK for the past six months, not really soft water but quiet acceptable.
Because of the water and several other problems with the property we are trying to legally get out from under the property, so we really don’t want to upgrade the water system any. Alternatively we can go back to using the Rio Grande as our water source as most of our neighbors do. The water is clean but the state health dept, frowns on this practice for health reasons.
I’m assuming that the resin is fouled. What can I use to clean the resin? Most over the counter cleaners I see are for iron removal, we have no iron in the water according to the lab analysis. Do you have any suggestions as to how to get the softener going again? Thank you for your time.
Answer: You might be throwing “good-money-after-bad” here in an effort to revive your softener. If your Kenmore is an older unit, it may be practical to replace the resin in the softener with new. Years ago, Kenmore softeners were good quality units, and if this is an older system you might still expect a reasonable lifetime if the resin is replaced. In recent years these softener have become more “entry level”, and are not intended to have a very long service lifetime (as evidenced by the 1 or 2 year warranty). Cleaning the resin may not be the way to go – better to replace it with new resin – the resin might have become deactivated over time due to oxidation by the injected hydrogen peroxide, or the resin bed may have become fouled with sediment or sulfur oxide particulate. Replacement ion-exchange resin is available on our site for $130.00 delivered. The other way to proceed is to replace the water softener. A good metered commercial grade water softener using the Autotrol 255/762 Logix control, in 48,000 grains capacity, is available for $725.00 delivered. Please let us know if you have any other questions.