Water Softeners and Air Filtration Systems - EcoWater/Kenmore - new water softener owner, please help :)

Hi,

I just purchased my first house and it has an EcoWater (looks like a Kenmore) two tank water softener in the basement. It looks very similar to what the flash animation describes in the sticky post (which was extremely helpful).

It had salt completely hardened in the bottom of the Brine tank and was not working. I completely cleaned and washed out the Brine tank, put the plunger back in and figured I would just run it through a cycle to see what happened. (No salt and no water in the Brine Tank).

The unit seemed to start filling the Brine Tank very slowly until it had about 1 inch of water in it. Then it stopped and still sounded like it was filling but I'm not sure where the water was going...I don't think the discharge hose was going. About 20-30 minutes later I heard a change in sound and now it was definitely discharging water. For the next hour it made various sounds but continued to discharge water. Eventually it stopped.

The whole process took about 1 hour 45 minutes.

My question is... what am I missing? It seems like the Brine Tank should have filled, then emptied, then the unit should have backwashed/cleaned/discharged.

Is there an initial amount of water that should be in the Brine Tank? Is there some part of the system I should examine first?

Thanks much for any help! My water is as hard as nails and its killing our dishes!! :rolleyes:

Ok.... I don't think I've made any progress but here's what I've done today:

I manually started a manual cycle and realized that I probably needed at least enough water in the Brine Tank to cover the valve so it can suck water back in - since during the fill cycle it only fills an inch or so. I stepped through all the Cam positions until it stopped back at Service and quit.

I filled up the Brine Tank with about 3-5 gallons of water and a 40lb bag of salt. Then I set the timer to start a recharge cycle.

The Fill cycle, again, only filled one inch and lasted about 5-10 minutes. Then the Cam went right past the BR position onto BW. Is that normal? Its at BW right now... I'm just not sure what to look for - I know so little about these things and feel like I'm floundering. Any help or suggestions anyone could give would be greatly appreciated!!!

Following up my last post:

After the Cam went past BR to BW it continued all the way around in a bit of a hurry (maybe 30 minutes?) and started over.

I'm not sure how much it filled but it stopped at BR this time and drained about 6 inches of water from the Brine Tank. Is this normal?

It continued normally through the entire cycle which took about a little over an hour. Is it safe to say the system it working normally at this point? Anything else I should do?

The water softener seems to be working ok but there is one little problem that persists. The fill cycle is non-existant. It starts to fill and water seems to be coming out (slowly, but coming) and after it fills an inch (10 minutes or less), it moves on to the next cycle. I do not believe the valve is closing at the bottom like it would if the float reached the top....

Any advice? Please?

Have you completely reviewed this thread?

http://forum.doityourself.com/showthread.php?t=174318

Many seemed to resolve Sears softener problems with that thread.

Also review ...

http://www.kenmorewater.com/website/animations/product-animation/ts_index.html

and this one ...

http://www.systemsaver.com/morton-website/instructions/index.html

Wish I could be more help