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Brine Tank Sizing
June 2, 2008 |
The brine tank (or salt tank) size can be important when selecting the water softener for your needs. Some people prefer a smaller tank due to the fact that their softener has been over-sized to allow for higher flow rate requirements. Others prefer a larger brine tank because their water is high in hardness and a smaller tank would need to be filled too often. Others simply want to fill their tanks with salt only once per year.
For those reasons, Water Value provides brine tank size selection for most of our softener models on the same page that you purchase the system from. Smaller 24,000 grain capacity softeners will only have the standard 15×17x36 rectangular brine tank available, but the larger 48,000 grain and 64,000 grain can be upgraded to the 18×33, 18×40 tanks. The commercial size 24×41 brine tank should only be used on high volume applications. This brine tank does not have a salt grid available for it and the color is black (charcoal) only.
The standard 15×17x36 rectangular brine tank will hold up to 275 pounds of salt pellets or 6-40 pound bags. The 18×33 round brine tanks hold up to 375 pounds of salt or 9-40 pound bags. The 18×40 round brine tanks can hold up to 450 pounds of salt or 11-40 pound bags. Finally, the commercial 24×41 round brine tanks hold up to 700 pounds of salt pellets which equates to over 17-40 pounds bags of salt. These volumes do not take into account the 4-inches that the brine grid takes up on the bottom of the brine tank.
Due to the fact that there are so many different sizes of brine tanks, the manufacturer of the safety float assembly, which is included with all water softener systems we carry, require that the float rod be trimmed to size for your particular tank. Detailed instructions for trimming this float are written on a bright pink tag which is attached to the float assembly. We also have instructions for trimming this float rod on our Installation Example section.
Some brine tanks are also available in different colors. The common colors can include blue, almond or black. You can coordinate the color of your brine tank to compliment the color of your softener system’s media tank. For example, a blue tank jacket can look good with a blue brine tank, but an almond tank jacket looks great with a black brine tank.
The standard 15×17x36 brine tank cover comes with a molded handle for cover removal while the round brine tank covers do not have a handle. The round covers are quite easy to remove even without a molded handle. Most of the softeners we carry come default with blue media tanks, so customers tend to order blue brine tanks. If your brine tank is going to be located in a highly visible area (garage, carport or main floor utility), you will probably want to order a color combination which will look right for the location. But if your system is going to be located in a utility room in the basement, color combinations probably do not matter much to you in this case.
All of our residential brine tanks also have an overflow elbow fitting on the side of the brine tank. We are often asked what this fitting is for. This fitting is to be connected to a 1/2-inch drain line in the case of a power failure while the control valve is running through a regeneration process. While obviously rare, it could happen. Because all of our water softener brine tanks come with a safety overflow device, some local plumbing codes do not require that this overflow fitting be connected to a drain, but we recommend that you do so anyway.
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