Oh.

[da]

...Water softeners work much better when they're plugged in.

It took two tries, the first about a month ago, to figure out why the water-softener seemed to not be water-softening so well. The first time, I noticed that the salt wasn't melting very fast, and it'd been a few months since I'd replaced it. But when I turned the dial and ran it manually, it seemed to work.

This time, I checked all of the checklist items in the Reader's Digest How to Fix Everything. I even removed all of the old salt (which has gone brown) and washed down the inside of the tank. (what the heck do I do with a five-gallon pail of not-very-attractive old salt? ...wash it off and use it? Put it out with the trash?!). It took an embarrassing length of time for me to realize that the dangling power cord wasn't the Skil saw which sits nearby, but the water-softener.

The last time I used that saw, and apparently unplugged it twice, was well before Christmas, possibly before Thanksgiving. Oops...

That might explain why the dishwasher has been leaving more and more white film on the dishes; it's been washing with really really hard water. *headdesk*

(Anybody know whether I've done irreparable damage to the dishwasher with this escapade? Or the pipes?)

Comments

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

(Anybody know whether I've done irreparable damage to the dishwasher with this escapade? Or the pipes?)

Or the (no longer made) dishes? :-)

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Or the (no longer made) dishes? :-)

That shouldn't be a problem. They've always come clean with a hand-washing. I'll see how they do in the dishwasher tonight.

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

They've been getting cloudier and cloudier-looking over the past several months, though, no?

[Shouldn't you be in bed?]

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Yes, they have, but a hand-washing restores them.

Yes, I should. And I'm going. :)

[mynatt.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure the calcium deposited on your pipes in the past few months will gradually come off. You might get a clump which comes loose at once, though.

As a kid, every summer when canning with my mother we would heat large quantities of hot, softened water in the kettle which was normally used for boiling untreated water for our tea, and after a while a year's accumulation of minerals would come off.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Great. My house has kidney stones.

Maybe I should toss a few asprin into the purifier mix, those things are supposed to be painful.

[quingawaga.livejournal.com]

Huh...so it talks about water softeners in that book, eh? mccorpsecorpse got it for Christmas. Maybe I should take a look at it, and see if there's a way to make the hulking water softener in OUR basement work...or if the water pipes actually bypass it, which I suspect is the case...

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

oh, it's a good book, it is. A bit frustrating at times when there's almost enough detail as I wanted; or the model they have is very different from the thing that's broken. But I've been quite happy with it on the whole. ...Our water softener looks exactly the same as the model they illustrate.