Lately, our most frequently asked question, or rather statement, is that our water treatment systems such as softeners, conditioners and automatic filters arrive with empty tanks. This is true for some very obvious and good reasons least of which is the fact that very few UPS delivery drivers can, or want to, lift a 150 pound tank.

But putting the media in the tank is very easy. Much easier than trying to position that 150 pound tank to where it needs to connect to your water pipes. In homes or buildings with basements or utility rooms, most people can appreciate that fact. And if you visit our installation and assembly page, you’ll see that there really is not much to putting a complete system together.

Some of the owner’s manuals will also explain how to assemble the system. The Autotrol Logix owner’s manual is a good example, but our instructional example is just as good and it has pictures.

No, the softeners do not come with salt. You will need to buy a couple of bags of that locally. It would be too expensive to ship $4 worth of salt in a 40 pound bag. That bag would end up costing at least $30 after shipping. Besides, many people would like to have the choice of using either softener salt (sodium chloride) or potassium chloride.

Unless you are purchasing a large softener (80,000 grain capacity or larger), your system will not require a layer of gravel on the bottom. The gravel layer is to help with water flow and softener resin is slippery enough to prevent flow rate restrictions to a point. But all of our auto-filters come with a gravel bed designed to reside on the bottom of the tank. The media in carbon, birm, greensand and other filters is not as flow friendly as cation water softener resin beads, so the gravel is necessary. Simply pour the gravel in first. If you forget to put the gravel in first, put it in anyway. Once the system backwashes once or twice, the gravel will work it’s way down to where it belongs.

Just remember that we here at WaterValue.com have designed these systems to include everything you need to get up and running with your new water conditioner.

If your water comes from a municipality or community well, by law it has chlorine added to it. If you own a private well, it is not necessary to chlorinate your water, but treating your private well water with chlorine can solve numerous problems.

First of all it should be noted that chlorine by itself and in small quantites is not harmful. But when it reacts with the chemicals, minerals and elements in water it has been proved to be a carcinogen. With that in mind it is important to realize that while chlorine has many benefits in so far a water treatment is concerned, it is also a good idea to remove it before it reaches your point of use (POU) such as shower heads or drinking water faucets.

Chlorine is a powerful oxidizer and because of that reaction with iron, which is predominant in private wells, the iron can be precipitated and filtered from the water. Another result of chlorine’s oxidation is the removal of offensive odors such as hydrogen sulfide from the water. Often times iron and hydrogen sulfide exist together, so as you can imagine, chlorine provides a useful additive to problem water such as this. Bacteria and algae also do not stand much of a chance at survival in chlorinated water.

There are a couple of easy methods to chlorinating your water. One is by use of a chemical feed pump. The pump is attached to a tank of chlorine and as water flows through the point of entry (POE) main water line of your home or business, the pump injects chlorine at a rate that is set up by a qualified water treatment specialist. All the homeowner need do is keep that chlorine tank full.

The other method of chlorination is at the well itself with a dry pellet chlorinator such as the WellPro model we sell online. It attaches to your well head and is activated when your submerged pump kicks on. The dry chlorine pellets are stored in a hopper that gravity feeds these pellets at an adjustable rate based on your pump’s flow. The nice feature of this method is that even your submerged pump is reaping the benefits of oxidized water so that its impeller is likely to last much longer without iron buildup. This method also provides for longer contact time with the water increasing the efficiency of the chlorine.
But the most important thing to consider when chlorinating water is removing the chlorine before you ingest or bathe in it. That is what activated carbon filtration is designed to do. If you examine our WellPro chlorinator web page you’ll notice a diagram in the center of it illustrating the use of a backwashing carbon filter system. Even the manufacturer recommends one of those. The diagram shows the filter in line before a softener, but WaterValue believes the carbon filter should be downline of the softener for various reasons that we’ll cover some other time.

In any case, while chlorinating your water will certainly solve and prevent a great deal of problems, do not forget to consider the carbon filter.

There were a lot of phone calls today and most of them were from people with some great questions, but there is not enough time to deal with all of them today. The subject that came up today did not originate with a phone call; it was an online order.

We’ve run into this matter before. The customer has problem water and wants to treat his excessive iron with an iron filter and his hardness with a water softener. The water softener alone will treat up to 3 parts-per-million (ppm) of iron, but beyond that, it needs help and a Birm filter is a good choice when you have ferric iron without an odor to it. So he orders both a softener and a Birm filter.

When the delivery is made, the customer is confused as to which tank is which. Even if they are different sizes, how does one know which tank is for the Birm filter media and which tank is for the softener resin? Because the tanks arrive empty and the media is in separate bags, how is he going to know which bags to add to which tank?

In this case, the distributor tube has the answer. The media tanks will ship with the distributor tube installed. The distributor tube is simply a pipe that runs from the bottom of the media tank to the top where it presses into the base of the control valve. At the bottom of the distributor tube is a screen or “basket” with slits in it that allow water to pass through but not media. Because the softener resin is made up of larger beads than the filter media, the slits in the standard basket distributor are just that; standard. The filter media on the other hand is made up of smaller particles and is considered finer. It requires a special “fine mesh” basket distributor to keep the media from flowing through the basket. A fine mesh distributor basket looks like a bunch of flat plates stacked on top of one another.

The BD1050 is a standard mesh distributor basket and the BD1050-710 is a fine mesh distributor basket. If you purchase both an auto-backwashing filter and a softener, the tank with the fine mesh distributor basket will be the one for the filter media.