Softener Capacity Information
There is a new featured article on the web site which deals with the method for determining the capacity of your water softener for setup and programming purposes. This is not to be confused with sizing a water softener. A water softener’s size depends on the number of people using water, the amount of corrected hardness in your water and your flow rate requirements. The capacity of a softener equates to the amount of water that will pass through it before the media bed is saturated with hardness ions and needs regenerating.
This new article pertains mostly to the Fleck brand of on demand or metered water softeners. It will answer the question that the control valve’s programming is asking for. In order to program in the information that it needs, you will have to know the number of people using water, the amount of corrected hardness of your water (in grains-per-gallon, GPG) and the size of your softener. The best way to determine your water’s corrected hardness is to test it for calcium hardness and iron content. With this information you can simply follow the 4 steps in our setup article and you will have your system capacity answer.
The Fleck service manuals are written for the water treatment professional, so they will not contain information for arriving at this answer. In the past we would get several calls each day from people wanting to know their system capacity, which is not really much trouble to come up with once the above mentioned factors are known. The problem was, most of these folks did not know the answer to those questions. Hopefully, this informational article will help to clear things up for most people.
