Sep
19
Regeneration and Backwash Time Of Day
September 19, 2007 |
All of the brands of control valves for water softeners and automatic backwashing filters that we carry have a factory default setting for the time of day that the control valve will schedule a backwash or regeneration. That time of day is 2:00 AM. With the computer controlled electronic valves, the backwash/regenerate time of day is one of the first prompts you will run into when programming your valve. With the mechanical control valves such as the Fleck 2510 and 5600, it’s not so obvious.
Note the little red button on the front of the mechanical version of the Fleck 5600 control valve. Press that button in and hold it while you rotate the outer wheel - or gear - on the center front of the valve until the correct time of day appears in the notched window at the bottom of the dial. So once the correct time of day is set on this controller, when a backwash or regeneration is required, this valve will initiate it at 2:00 AM.
Sometimes it is convenient to have the control valve backwash/regenerate at a different time. During backwash/regeneration, treated water is unavailable. So if you are taking a bath or shower while the controller is doing its thing, you will be filling the hot water heater’s tank with untreated water. For some water treatment applications, this could cause scale buildup inside the water heater. So if you regularly wash laundry or bathe between 2:00 and 3:30 AM, you might want to consider changing the time of backwash/regeneration.
As stated above, changing the backwash/regeneration time on the electronic control valves is pretty easy. Simply go into setup mode (accessing setup mode is covered in your service manual) and adjust the backwash/regeneration time. But the mechanical control valves do not have a programmable display, so you must adjust the time of day instead. For example: if you would rather that your control valve backwash/regenerate at 11:00 PM, you have to tell it that the time of day is 3 hours earlier than it truly is. “Seriously? Is that how it’s done?” Yes. If you’re reading this at 5:00 PM and you want your softener/auto-filter to backwash at 11:00 PM, you would set the time of day - as explained above - to 2:00 PM.
For the most part, you will not need to adjust the factory default’s 2:00 AM setting, but if you work 2nd or 3rd shift, 2:00 AM might not be convenient for you and you may want to change the backwash/regeneration time. Also, if you have both a softener and an auto-backwashing filter, or even two auto filters, you will want to offset the backwash/regeneration time on one of them so that they are not both flushing water at the same time, which might overwhelm your drain system. Keep in mind that these controllers do not schedule backwash/regeneration every day of the week, so the odds of two different control valves scheduling the event for the same day are marginal, but it’s common practice to play it safe.
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