Water softener lost effectivness today's waterchange

For the first tome my whole house water softener test a GH drop of only 107 PPM from 550 PPM GH. Normally after a manually induced recharge of my water softener GH PPM registers at 10 or 18 PPM. It is 5 years old and 1 year since I last cleaned out all the orifice so Im hoping between now that the next two week cleaning it out will make all the difference.

No way my fish can live in 550 PPM GH water and will die (except my Gobi) after about 2 months as the GH PPM increases in the tank way past 1000 PPM. Just the way GH accumulates if you don't have a way to control it over time. I may have to buy a one one ($120)

Anyway those of you who have a watersoftener for whatever reason, using the API liquid GH/KH test kit really help monitor the efficiency of the system before it gets bad.

dudley said:

I don't understand what orifice you need to clean out. As long as you keep your salt reservoir filled, the softener should work properly. Unless the incoming raw water has changed somehow.

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Most "modern" water softeners have maintenance of a screen, orifice and O-ring that sits on the left side of the valve block, instructions are usually posted on the salt tank cover. If these parts get clogged, leak or calcified, the system will fail to properly recharge the zeolite beads.

Incidentally I found out that there was nothing wrong with my water softener. The reason the recharge seemed diminished was becasue I had forgotten that it is necessary to have someone take a shower first becasue the hot water tank (50 gal) and circuit is down stream of the WS system and the cold water circuit is up stream.

So in Fall (now) when I go to mix cold and hot after a fresh recharge although the cold water is being perfectly de-ionized of Cal/Mag, the hot water side coming from the tank has 50 gallons of water to pass with 550 PPM Cal Mag before it receives new water from the WS system. So the result after recharge starting my water change was about 200-250 PPM GH for the first tank and with each tank water change the hot water tank was mixed with new de-ionized water dropping the GH PPM until on the last tank I was reading 7 PPM GH.

So I just have to remember that in Fall when I use hot water to mix with cold for the fishies that I need to take a shower first after recharging to deplete the hot water tank full of high GH water.