Smart Bottle Water in Tank

[rwojnar]

We have a barely 2 month old Smart Bottle.

Right now we have 5 inches of Potassium in there and there is water covering it.

And in 7 1/2 week we have used almost 4 bags of potassium.

Someone told us that you need 30% more potassium than sodium. We had not heard that before.

There were other problems with it but we think those are solved.

For your information, we use about 1000 gal of water a week. (about 4000 gal per month).

So, should there be that much water in there?
Should it be using so much softener?
Does it really take that much more potassium than sodium in the unit?
Could this unit need to be replaced?

Lemme' know.

Thanks.

rwojnar

[ion_avenger]

Nice choice on the Smart Bottle-I have one in my house now and I totally love it!

Yes potassium salt is 18-30% less efficient than regular sodium salt.

Unless you have some special programming on yours, you should have less water in the bottom of the tank. The smart bottle uses 'dry brine' tech. so there should be no more than 1" of water in the bottom of the tank.

If you have standard programming on the system there could be problem with the brine refill assembly on the smart bottle system. Nice thing about them is they're totally modular so you don't need to replace the system-just a little module.

How hard is your untreated water? If you post the hardness here, we can tell you exactly how much sodium salt or potassium salt you should be using.


Check this out about potassium salt: http://www.orau.org/PTP/collection/consumer%20products/potassiumgeneralinfo.htm

[rwojnar]

17ppm hardness

[rwojnar]

Hello again.

I am waiting for a followup.

Thanks.

rwojnar

[ion_avenger]

17ppm is <1 grain which is soft water, did you mean 17 grains per gallon (gpg)?

If 17 gpg, then your system will clean every 900 gallons when using potassium chloride salt. So u're cleaning about once a week. It should go through about 30-40lbs of potassium chloride salt per month if you're only using 1000 gallons per week.

Push the UP arrow on your system to goto STASTICS MODE and then tell us your statistics that the system has recorded.

[rwojnar]

Thanks.

I'll do it.

rwojnar

[rwojnar]

Are you ready? Here we go...
Clean - 5 days ago
In Service - 54 days
Cleanings - 10
Total Vol - 6831 GL
Last Clean - 1098 GL
Peak Flow - 0
Avg Col - 124 GL/day
Water Hardness - 25 GRN
Clean @ - 11PM
Override - 7 days
Tank Fill - 13 minutes
Percolation - 180 minutes
Pre clean - 10 minutes
Cleaning ycle - 100 minutes
Backwash - 6 minutes
Recover - 5 minutes
USU08 - USU08a
Flow rate -0

When we had our water tested, it came out to be around 17grn.
yell4george, who installed the system said they like to set the hardness at 25grn.
I am not quite sure why.

Remember, we used almost 4 bags of potassium in about 7 weeks

[ion_avenger]

That is common industry method. The system takes more out than just the actual hardness so statistics say to raise the hardness number by a minimum of 10% to accomodate. They probably accomodating for other stuff that can get in the water like iron, lead, copper, zinc etc... or local sodium content or maybe even changes in average hardness. We have some areas where the hardness will change (high to low and back again) through the year so we program for the worst case to make sure nothing gets through. I like longer backwashes because we have lower water pressures around here - do you know what your water pressure is?

System fills at 0.5gpm so 13 minutes is about 6 1/2 gallons.
6 1/2 gallons of water will dissolve about 17 1/2 lbs of potassium salt.
unless you have something weird in the water, you could probly backoff the fill time a little and leen out the salt useage.

Gregs on vacation but I think he gets back today so lets see what he thinks too.