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I would like to talk to you for a few minutes about the water treatment equipment available
on the market today so you can see exactly what's in it, how it works, how they are built.
I have a couple of different system here, this a standard typical water softener or
conditioner and this would be a water treatment system that was actually designed to remove
chlorine from the water, had carbon it. I want you to look at how these are constructed,
this one has a shiny stainless steel cover, and this one of course does not, you'll notice
underneath that cover again its a fiberglass tank. They are typically 3/16 inch fiberglass,
fiberglass tanks tend to take pressures of 120 lbs before they will pop or crack. They
are typically designed to last 5-7 years and typically fiberglass isn't considered food
grade. They fill these contain ers up about 3/4's of the way with their media, in which
case this one would have been carbon and this one here would have been a resin. Water softeners
are all pretty much the same they have a down tube in them which is where the water gets
picked up at, the water actually comes in the back by a tube an then they will run it
through their valve and usually the valve will take it from something like that in this
case it's one inch and drop it down to about less than 1/2 in, and the reason for that
is because of contact time or flow rates. They need to slow that water down as it goes
through the equipment, what happens is the water tends to take the path of least resistance
and it funnels or channels down the the bottom where its getting picked up by these tubes.
Alot of that water can typically get picked up straight down at the bottom by funneling
or channeling and never really has enough contact time. Contact time is very important
when you are talking water treatment because if you don't have contact time you don't have
anything. Anyway, water softeners are all the same, these systems are pretty much the
same its just a matter of what type of media they put in them. The reason why its filled
3/4 is because the rest of the space is known as "free board". Free board means its water,
they have to have that free board space and the purpose of that is because typically these
systems will go through what's called a "regeneration" or a cleaning about every 1 to 3 days on an
average. When they do that they reverse the direction of the water, the water then comes
down the tube and comes up and it fluffs up the bed to get rid of that funneling or channeling
effect. Does the ion exchange in this case and then its back into service. They typically
use anywhere from 60 to 165 gallons of water as well as 9 to 20 lbs of salt to regenerate
a water softening system. These other systems like this one over here they typically would
just use water and fluff up the bed to get rid of the funneling effect also to clean
those out. As you can see they are all pretty much the same.