Brine!

[da]

Cleaning out a water-softener brine tank. If you don't own a house somewhere with hard water, you'll probably never have to worry about it. But I was looking in the tank (to see if it needed more salt) and realized there was some kind of gunk on the inside walls. And it hadn't been cleaned in six years at least. Hm.

So, yeah, the water in the brine tank doesn't circulate up into the rest of your house, it just flushes out the calcium and magnesium that collect on the polystyrene beads in the resin tank (which turn hard water into soft water). It's a nice closed system, it cleans itself (using the brine) every two weeks. But if there's crap in the brine tank, I'm thinking it's kind of gross.

The Book of Fixing Household Stuff said it should be cleaned regularly, but it didn't say how- and there were some fiddly pieces in the tank I didn't want to break. Googling pointed me at this advice on LJ, and I followed her lead, using a scrubber sponge and dish soap. And a LOT of rinsing, which is about as annoying as rinsing out a garbage can. But less icky.

The only icky part was at the beginning, when I discovered that (I think) the previous² owners had added a nifty little riser into the brine tank, to separate the salt from the brine goo at the bottom. Lifting up this riser revealed... grey goo, mostly salt, and I decided the rest was minerals. For no real reason other than it would be too icky otherwise.

But everything washed off with no real problems, and I just ran the softener through a regeneration cycle and it didn't start making horrible noises or give any indication I broke it.

Comments

[says-simon.livejournal.com]

I used to own a house. sigh. I've actually owned two houses--not at the same time. It's a major goal for me to own a house again, but I have so many body things to pay for that it's just sad. It's like I'm starting all over again, but from further away.

Feh. I thought we were the same age, but you're younger than me. Feh.

Anyway, I had a water softener at my last house. When we got it, there was a solid piece of salt in it and we couldn't break it up for anything. Had to pay someone to fix it. That thing only gave us trouble the whole time.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

"I thought we were the same age, but you're younger than me. Feh."

...oh, but I'm so old on the inside.

Our water-softener has given us trouble exactly once before, and that was when I left it unplugged for a few months by mistake.

Hm, re-reading that entry, I was surprised to discover I have washed down the walls of the brine tank before, but I definitely didn't upend it to clean out the gunk in the bottom.

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

Go you!

Maybe this will inspire me to get off my duff and change the filter in our RO system, which has needed changing for so long I'm embarrassed to even think about it.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Heh. Maybe that will be enough of a reminder for me to vacuum the furnace filters, which haven't been cleaned in WAY too long.

I wish we had an RO unit. The minerals would eat it up for dinner, though. A friend of mine locally had one; they neglected to tell him it wouldn't work so well with water as hard as ours.

[earthling177.livejournal.com]

I'm confused... while in *theory* a RO system will in fact remove hard-water minerals, I think that in practice it's always installed after the water softener to remove the sodium/potassium added by the ion exchange. The idea was that for water that is too hard, there'll be too much of a salty taste, and RO systems were invented to remove sodium/potassium ions to begin with (to desalinate ocean water in areas that don't have enough fresh water available).

Then again, maybe domestic RO systems were not as macho as the systems made to desalinate ocean waters?

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

That was my understanding, too, that the RO is installed after the water softener. I was saying I wished we had one because I get tired of refilling the water-pitcher, not anything about the softener :) Though of course we could get a faucet filter, but those can be annoying too.

And my local friend who bought one didn't know it needed to be behind a water softener, and they didn't tell him when they sold it to him. :/

[dpolicar]

Hey, you solved the grey goo problem! Congratulations!

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Solve: no. Push it elsewhere, yes.

Isn't that always the way.