Water Softener - Foamy, Brown, Hard water after regen

[mattmouth182]

I'm looking for advise with my Sterling water softener. It appears to use Clack WS1 parts.

My water softener has seemed to be losing effectiveness over the past few months. I started noticing odd behavior like foamy and gross tasting water some mornings and harder water than normal all the time.

After doing some reading, I thought that maybe my media had been fouled by iron. I have an iron filter before the softener, but not too long ago had an issue where the iron filter drain got plugged and the filter itself started under performing. I fixed that issue, but figured the higher iron for a few months might have dirtied my softener's resin.

So I decided to try some "Rust Out" in the brine tank. After a manual regen, I ran the tap into a bucket and noticed the water was REALLY dark brown and foamy. Now I knew that the backwash process should have drained everything from the regen process down the drain and not into the house water. But I figured that it might just be that the Rust Out freed up a lot of iron and it didn't backwash enough.

Since it was so nasty, I did another treatment of Rust Out and let it regen overnight. I got the same results. I decided to do a manual regen with just salt and see how it looked. Less brown, but still really foamy and definitely bad. I did a 4th regen overnight a results were about the same as the third but the water seemed to clear up after about 2min of running the tap compared to probably 5+min after the first regens.

Something is clearly mechanically wrong since I am getting such dirty water after the regen. I was thinking about buying a seal pack and piston kit, but I'm wondering why it's not softening? I Could see the seals causing the leak to the freshwater, but not the lack of softening.

I checked the drain during the brining and backwash steps. It's slow during brining, but looks to be flowing plenty during the backwash step. I removed the drain fitting and checked it to be sure, it was unrestricted.

The water level rises in the "brine fill" stage, and seems to correctly draw during the "draw/slow rinse" stage.

Not sure where to go from here? Does it make sense to continue to try to repair this thing or does it sound dead? I figured if I can get it to soften the water, then that's proof its working, and I just need to repair the seals? But why isn't it softening?

Raw water hardness is around 20-30 GPG, also contains a moderate amount of iron and tannins.

Thanks for any help!

 

[RS]

I have been successful with some minor repairs on softeners, one thing is they all seem to have a strainer screen someplace, and that can become clogged. Another thing I have done is pull the spool valve out and clean and grease the O-rings, no new parts necessary. That seemed to make it work much more smoothly. I know some folks put Iron out in their brine tank to clean the resin.

 

[mattmouth182]

Thanks! I was worried about how dirty water was getting into my tap water after a regen, so I did some testing:

1. After 2 days the water was quite clear, but it's still hard. I used the manual mode to force a regen, but skipped through to the backwash phase, then skipped brine and just did the final 4min rinse. The water was still very clear with no foam after this process. So i know that the issue isn't simply from stirring things up from the backwash.

2. Next I re-applied the Iron Out cleaner to the brine tank as directed. This time I wanted to give the cleaner more time to work. So, I did a manual regen, but shut off the water flow into and out of the softener at 10 minutes. Then let it sit for 10 minutes before opening the bypass valves again. I repeated this every other 10min until the 60min brine cycle was up. To make sure i used all the brine/cleaner, I restarted the brine cycle manually and repeated my 10 on 10 off procedure, ending on brine with the bypass valves open. I then repeated the final rinse cycle 2 times.

While the softener was in brine, but bypassed and "soaking", i tried the tap water. No discoloration/foam. So it seems the dirty water isn't "leaking" into the tap water here either - and likely not at all. So I'm thinking not mechanical issue! This is good news because i didn't want to replace the media or parts on a system that was failing in multiple ways.

After this process and then a salted regen, no foam, no bad water after the regen. ( I started playing with the softener settings and now do an 8min rinse every regen).

I got soft water! But it seems like it only lasted 2 days The water is nowhere near as bad as when the softener is bypasses, but it's not what it used to be.

Has anyone used this stuff? Feels like overpriced Iron out/scammy but might be worth a shot?
https://crystalclean.us/why-it-works/
I am also going to try citric acid becuase my water has a lot of tannins. Maybe that's got my resin clogged up too?

I guess if none of this works (including rigging up a recirculation cleaning process), it's time for a resin swap?