Slept ok last night.
Felt productive yesterday morning and attempted some maintenance on the water softener. The issue, again, is periodic episodes of very salty water. Started last November. Not good. No error codes on the controller. Checked the manual, apparently there's some annual maintenance we're supposed to do on this thing, which we haven't been doing. There's a "salty water" fault, and a few possible causes in the trouble-shooting section. One recommended action is related to the maintenance item we've not been doing. That seemed like the most promising lead.
Plumbing is not my forté. Looked simple enough on YouTube. Of course, my particular model, although allegedly the same, was different.
One unanticipated problem was with the float switch. The bottom of the tube it sits in is filled with salt. Came out easy enough. Trying to put it back in, I couldn't get it down all the way to the bottom to allow a little plastic bolt near the top to get through the hole in the tube to secure it. Tube is too small to get my arm down. How to remove salt?
These little frustrations annoy me, irritate me and make me angry. I have a little spring-loaded grabby-thing for when you drop stuff into relatively inaccessible places. I used it to pull little pellets of salt out, one by one, slowly, tediously, until I'd removed enough to get the float low enough to get the bolt through the hole. I rinsed it with fresh water after, but I suppose I'm going to have to buy a new one soon.
Then I tried to put the part I removed back on the control valve. As it happened, it wasn't clogged, so it's not the source of our issue.
Of course.
Two screws, one above, very accessible, the other below, nearly inaccessible. The video warned to be careful as a screw might enter the brine tank and then you'd have to go "fishing for it." I thought I'd be smart and use a magnetic bit.
It's not a ferrous screw.
Of course.
Despite my best efforts to be exceedingly careful in getting this screw into a black hole in black plastic beneath a block of black plastic with a flashlight in my mouth...
Tink!
Into the brine tank.
So, by hand, I remove nearly all the salt and most of the water. I'm looking for the screw as I remove salt and water, but no joy. I'm placing the removed salt and water into two buckets. Mitzi gets home and we find another bucket. We start removing salt from one bucket and putting it in the new bucket, again looking for the screw. She found it on the third or fourth handful of salt.
God bless her.
I get the thing put back together, but by now I'm exhausted and my hands are scraped and burning, especially my fingertips and finger nails.
I should know better by now.
Anyway, before this I tested the water from the street and again after the "maintenance." Very little difference. I suspect the resin bed is fouled somehow. I'm going to run some extra recharge cycles and see if it recovers, but I'll do that at night. Failing that, at the next episode of "salty water," I guess we're calling a plumber.
Such is life.
Originally posted at Nice Marmot 09:10 Tuesday, 30 April 2024