Thick Salt and Water in the Bottom 4" of Water Softener... Okay or a Problem?

[webmonk]

I am not aware of any problems with my water softener, but I was letting the salt get used up so I could make sure there were no salt bridges below where I could see.

Once the salt got low I noticed that there was water in the bottom of the tank, and beneath it was about 4" of dense/thick salt sediment/sludge. I've been monitoring over the past few weeks to see if this gets used up as a normal processing of the unit. As far as I can tell the "sludge", or whatever you want to call it, doesn't seem to be dropping much, if at all.

I had a 2" diameter PVC pipe handy so I was using it to see if I could stir up the sludge/salt and get the pipe to the bottom of the tank, but it is very dense/thick and I am having difficulty.

Is this situation something I should be concerned about or normal? Should I simply fill it up with salt again and not worry about it?

 

[pasadena_commut]

More details would help.

In general terms, if your water softener has a tank to which you add salt, and you need to add it every 2 weeks (because at that point the water is no longer soft), then if you look in that tank at that point there should be nothing in it but maybe water. All the salt should be gone. (Because if there was still salt then the device could still wash divalent cations off the ion exchange resin to ready it to "soften" more water.)

So, back to your sludge. Run the unit until the water isn't soft. If that sludge is still there it most likely isn't salt. It could be sediment from your pipes, or I suppose even beads from the ion exchange column. You could start by picking up a little with an eye dropper, put it on a clean flat surface (white or clear), and look at it with a magnifying glass, or on the off chance you have one, a microscope. If you see things that look like dirt or rust then that's probably exactly what it is. If you see a bunch of tiny little balls of roughly the same size and shape then those are beads from the column, and you need to figure out why they are getting in there. You might need to replace the ion exchange column.

If it were mine I think I would remove all the sediment with a plastic cup or a shop vac, rinse the bottom once with water and pick up whatever is left. Once the tank was clean, fill it with salt as usual, and check the bottom again after the 2 weeks (or whatever the "out of salt" period is for that unit.) Hopefully it will still be pretty clean, and the sludge was just an accumulation of stuff built up over many years. If it is back, and especially if what is back are more beads, then the unit needs work.

If the tank is too deep to reach the bottom with your hand you can get a sample out by lowering a thin tube to the bottom, then put your finger over the end of the tube which is in the air, and drawing the tube out.

 

[webmonk]

Run the unit until the water isn't soft.

Thank you very much for your response. What do you mean by "run the unit"? The only ways I know to run it is when we are using water in the house or it is in regeneration mode (or whatever it is called).

I did get some out of the bottom and it should be salt based on the examination under a microscope.



The "sludge" is like uncured concrete, very thick and hard to push something through. As far as I can tell, the sludge has not diminished at all over the past month. Also, I don't think our water is any harder than it was before. Not sure what to make of it. I could try and take it all out with a vac (the only way I can reach the bottom) but I don't know how I'll be able to vacuum it all up because of how dense it is. Ugh.

 

[pasadena_commut]

It looks like a saturated salt solution with lots of crystals floating in it. I imagine that if a thick enough layer of that formed at the bottom of a tank then it might continue to grow as more salt is added. Just doesn't seem right that one would form though - isn't the outlet on the bottom of the tank? Anyway, if you can get a teaspoon or so of this material, put it in a tumbler full of water and stir. You should see the crystals spinning around at first then eventually they will dissolve. The result should be a glass of very salty water. If it doesn't all dissolve then there is something else in there.

Either way, it sounds like you need to clean out the bottom of the tank. If the shop vac cannot handle the viscosity try pouring some water in, stir it with a section of PVC pipe, then vacuum the more watery part off. Eventually it should all come out. I am concerned that if there is a drain on the bottom of that the pipe it might be packed up with salt crystals. Also concerned that there might be a screen on the bottom which is supposed to keep said crystals out of said drain, and that that screen might be damaged or missing.

 

[webmonk]

Thanks again for your input. One final question. How much water is typically in the bottom of a water softener when it is sitting idle? I have one that is generally like this.

 

[pasadena_commut]

I don't know, for the general case. I recall loading salt into the unit my in-laws had and if there was any water in it, it wasn't very much. I didn't have to do anything to pump it out first, just pop the top and pour in salt until it was full.

How does the water leave that tank? Is there a pipe or tube on the other side we can't see in the photo, or does the exit tube come in from the lid? If I had to bet it would be that the opening for the exit path is just above the water line that you marked.

 

[Bird Doo Head]

What Passadena_Com Mut said about a saturated solution makes sense.
In chemistry terms, when a solution is titled "Saturated", it means no more of a given solid can be dissolved in a volume of liquid.

The water in the brine tank gets saturated with sodium chloride because there is always solid waiting to dissolve. When the water can't accept any more, the undissolved stays as the slurry that you see.

At the laundry department where I worked, the machinery repair people used to clean the brine tanks about once per year to get the non-salt things out. They'd tell the operators not to add salt until the tank only had brown bits on the bottom. These softeners passed thousands of gallons per day each, so you won't have to clean as often. (Or do like my father did: Buy good salt & clean never.)

Paul