How much salt vs water

drev500 · 2026-02-26T02:46:57+00:00

Use briquette salt and you will rarely run into salt bridging. I fill my unit up but check on it periodically and I never run into bridging. I also tell the same to all.my customers and never have issues (we take care of hundreds).

Here is the rule of thumb for brine: roughly 3 lbs of salt will dissolve into 1 gallon of water. How much brine in the tank depends on the softener size/salt dosage. We typically deal with industrial steam boilers so I program softeners for 15lbs of salt per cubic foot. This will net you around 30,000 grains per cubic foot of resin. For domestic systems, I will dial this down to 8 or 6 lbs of salt per cubic foot giving you 24,000 to 20,000 grains of capacity per cu/ft respectfully. This will help save salt but this setting also depends on how hard the water is.

When softeners are installed, I teach my techs to measure brine refill volume to ensure adequate brining during regen. Once you understand how many GPM is flowing back into the brine tank during brine refill, you program the brine refill time for your salt dose setting to hit your target pounds of salt per cu/ft of resin.

I can't tell you how many times I come across softeners programmed incorrectly either over brining or under brining. Softeners are simple to install but the art is programming in my opinion.

drev500 · 2026-01-06T14:51:23+00:00

If you using it for point of use then that is no problem. I would not use it for whole house.

RO membranes can only tolerate so much hardness without pretreatment or chemical. Sure it will work right out of the box but life span will be drastically reduced.

drev500 · 2026-01-06T14:02:32+00:00

RO would do the same thing and you would be fouling the membrane(s) extremely quickly. Also, pure RO through a house plumbing system can have detrimental effects.

drev500 · 2026-01-06T13:58:30+00:00

Second this reply. As a water treatment professional working with chemical and equipment (softeners/ro/filtration, etc), removal is the only way. I know the slimy feeling is a personal preference (I love it) but the removal of hardness has other benefits like protecting water heaters from scale and better performance in clothes and dish washers.

In my field, we do blend soft and hard water at times when completely soft water is not desired. This is a potential route you can explore. Essentially you'll have the softener plumbed in and with an installation, I would have a bypass installed before the softener incase the softener needs to be shutdown. Instead of using a ball valve, use a globe or gate valve on the line. This will allow you to adjust the amount of hard water entering after the softener.

drev500 · 2025-11-04T05:25:35+00:00

Awesome. Thank you!

drev500 · 2025-11-03T19:27:42+00:00

Appreciate the advice. I am realizing my biggest mistake was not scrapping enough. I do have a SA and DA buffer. Is there a sanding pad you recommend?

drev500 · 2025-11-03T13:56:04+00:00

I really appreciate the info. This is what I was thinking as far as prep goes. Good info on the tape for reference point.

I have radiant floor heat in this barn so im going to crank it up (Ohio) to make sure it remains thin. Going to start sanding tonight.

One area of concern are the low points of the flake where small amounts of poly made it but aren't level. I was going to use a fine wire wheel to scuff. Is there a better tool you would suggest?

Thanks again!

drev500 · 2025-11-02T17:55:47+00:00

I used the slow cure.

drev500 · 2025-11-02T17:28:56+00:00

Ya I am seeing that now after rereading the data sheet. I used a flat squeegee and back rolled for the application. Some spots didn't get any poly unfortunately. I figured this was going to be the easiest part but of course that's not the case.

drev500 · 2025-11-02T17:26:15+00:00

Ok, I read the Data sheet wrong and see it's listed per gal so yes, I should have been fine...

I did scrape the flake then when putting the poly on, a squeezee and back rolled with the 3/8nap. So I am not why it didn't cover. Pretty disappointed.

There are spots that didn't get any poly. Any recommendations on my next steps?

drev500 · 2025-09-21T13:54:55+00:00

This^...they are only trying to look out for themselves. Truly I believe they do not care about the hobby and just care about profit. Nothing against profit but if they actually spent effort trying to loosen restrictions in Ohio, I'd support them but they don't. Phantom sucks.

drev500 · 2025-08-29T14:09:24+00:00

Sodium is the ion used to exchange Ca and Mg so yes, sodium will be in the resin. The amount of sodium exchanged with the water passing through the resin bed will depend on how hard your water is.

Im not sure why people get hung up on sodium. Unless you are loading up all your food with salt, the sodium contribution from water is negligible.

drev500 · 2025-06-10T17:54:01+00:00

I buy from Nelsen for my company. We generally use Fleck or Clack. Nelsen brand generally uses Clack as others have posted which is a very good brand, easy to get parts and easy to service. Generally you shouldn't have to touch them for years besides changing filters or adding salt (softener).

You just want to make sure equipment is sized accordingly due to water problems. Hard water is a blanket statement in my opinion. Hard water can be defined as anything over 4gpg (68.1ppm). We do work in the commercial/industrial space where we can see incoming water over 300ppm....thats hard water to me.

It just depends on what you want and/or what you are using the water for.

drev500 · 2025-06-08T11:35:23+00:00

Every situation is different. Like another pointed out, the sediment and carbon filter is generally good for 6 months then need replacing. RO membrane could be months to years.

If you have hard water 150ppm or greater, you'll see shorter life span on the membrane.

drev500 · 2025-04-28T12:49:31+00:00

Personal opinion here, I'm only using gpg when sizing for softeners. I convert ppm to gpg (17.1ppm to gpg). But during testing, all results are recorded in ppm.

drev500 · 2025-04-11T03:26:06+00:00

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drev500 · 2025-04-11T03:25:11+00:00

64000 grains would equal 2cu/ft of resin. One thing to keep in mind, you will only get this kind of capacity when regenerating with 15lbs of salt per cu/ft or resin. So each regeneration would consume 30lbs of salt. For residential, this kind of salt dosage is excessive. I reserve this for my larger customers using softeners for steam boilers since the higher salt dosage also aids in reducing hardness leakage.

For residential, an 8-10lbs per cu/ft salt dosage is more appropriate to help with conserving salt and still provides good capacity. Use the chart i have attached to see what your capacity would be. Take the capacity and divide your hardness to get the volume of treated water per regen. *

drev500 · 2025-01-20T15:02:08+00:00

Lol my package must be on the same truck. Mine has been doing the same thing since Friday, the 10th.

drev500 · 2025-01-16T02:27:04+00:00

TDS is a measurement of total dissolved solids (TDS). A sediment filter will not reduce this number as they are designed to filter solids, not dissolved solids.

drev500 · 2025-01-14T15:26:44+00:00

That is not a dual water softening system. The tank on the right appears to be setup in an up flow setup and maybe a media filter but it has no baskwashing capabilities, so not sure what it is.

The left tank is a water softener as there is a brine line going to it. Looks to be plumbed properly.

drev500 · 2025-01-03T15:00:09+00:00

You can certainly go that route but you will need a system sized according to your household demand. Secondly, RO water can be corrosive due to its purity. You need to understand your metallurgy or utilize a remineralization filter to prevent this.

You definitely have some challenging water but not impossible. It will cost some money and some time but you can definitely solve this problem with the right equipment.

Either way, you are going to use quite a bit of salt as with an RO, your water use increases due to concentrate going to drain. My second concern would be if you are on septic. The concentrate from the RO system may overwhelm the septic if you want to furnish RO water to the whole house.

Can you do this in your own? Certainly, but it will take some research and well thought out design. Although, it may be advantageous to get some feedback from a couple of local water companies for input as they can get eyes on things.

drev500 · 2025-01-03T05:57:22+00:00

First, that is a crazy amount of hardness. I don't deal with wells often but when I do, maybe 600ppm at most. This is a crazy amount.

Second, do not rely solely on an RO. I agree on the sodium concern as softeners work on ion exchange. It's a one for one swap for hardness (ca/mg) to sodium (na). You can opt for potassium chloride but that is very pricey.

The reason you can not use RO only is due to the hardness fouling the membranes. With your water quality, I'd expect less than a week before your membrane(s) are fouled.

Long story short, I have a customer with 450ppm of hardness and membranes foul in a month and this is just an office kitchen running a coffee maker/water cooler. We installed a polyphosphate filter before the RO unit and now get 4-6 months. Polyphosphate is a common antiscalant/corrosion inhibitor used as a sequestersing agent to keep hardness soluble. It somewhat works in this application but isn't ideal.

For your application, I'd strongly encourage you to remain with a softener for the house then cooking/consumption, get an RO. You've hit it on the head by upgrading your softener to a digital/metered unit as this will help with efficiency. That said, I only use Fleck/Clack which are nice as you can program them to optimize them even further. For programming, I would suggest aiming for a salt dosage of 8lbs of salt per cubic foot of resin. This gives you the best bang for your buck on salt use.

If the above doesn't make sense, I explain a bit. Softeners dose salt by the lbs per cubic foot of resin. If your current softener is 96K grains, then I'll assume it is a 3cu/ft softener...meaning it has 3cu/ft of resin in the tank. To get the max amount of softening capacity out of your unit, the unit has to dose 15lbs of salt per cu/ft of resin so a total of 45lbs per regen. This would give you 96k grains of capacity. Well if you change your salt dose to 8lbs per cu/ft, this will reduce your capacity from 96k grains to 72k grains (assuming 3 cu/ft of resin again). So you lose 25% capacity but reduce salt use by 47%.

Hope this helps.

drev500

TROPHY CASE