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I need your help. My water softener is not regenerating!
One short term solution is to try to manually regenerate the unit. Just push the lever on
the unit to start the cycle.
What could cause it to fail in the first place?
The timer mechanism might have failed. If the timer is broken or the clock wheels aren’t
turning, you’ll need to manually regen it until you can get it fixed.
Sounds like Doctor Who, who regenerates regularly.
You’re fighting a water softener, not Daleks and evil aliens.
What should I do after manually regenerating it?
You should watch the unit and verify that the unit is cleaning and regenerating the
salt in water softener. If the unit is stalling, there could be a problem with the drain pipe
or the over-flow control malfunctioning.
Why would that stop it from regenerating?
Imagine a toilet floater set too low, turning off water flow too soon. You should be glad
it is stopping too soon instead of too late, because a water softener continually filling
could flood your kitchen.
Better hard water than a flood of soft water. What could have disrupted the equipment?
Water softener equipment can be damaged by electrical shorts and outages. Even a power
outage could burn out the clock or throw the timer off.
I don’t think we’ve had power outages recently.
If the valve isn’t working, the whole unit could stall. And you could check that the
circuit breaker to the water softener hasn’t been tripped.
That might trip me up. What else could it be?
Check the siphon. If the siphon on the bottom is blocked, the brine in the bottom isn’t
pulled into the ion exchange resin.
So I may need to clean out the siphon.
And the filter screens. That’s a good time to replace any valves and o-rings, too.
What if I don’t want to do all this work?
Call a plumber or a water softener tech to troubleshoot it.
If only it were as easy as blasting aliens. Well, Doctor Who can fix anything, but he’d
certainly be able to fix a water softener.
You watch way too much science fiction.
I could do reality shows. How about Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs?