Now here’s something different. We are now posting questions asked by real live people and answering them on the blog. No, we don’t give away any information on the questioner - not even their first name or anything - but we do post their question if it’s deemed interesting or popular.

You might think this sounds like browsing a forum, but the main difference is that there will be no boring posts. All of them will pertain to good water treatment equipment questions. We have seen, and often visit, forums hosted by others in the water treatment industry and quite frankly, they can be boring and frustrating. When you’re looking for the answer to a good question on a forum, you’ll most likely need to wade through countless dead ends before you find what you’re looking for. Not so with this new feature. Simply go to the Water Value Blog and use the handy search feature on the left side of the page. Enter your question and if anyone else has ever asked it, you’ll find your answer.

Well, certainly not “daily” news. Most of our posts are going up on the main web site blog, but this one is handy to have too.

We are now in the process of adding more serviceable parts to the Water Softener Parts section. We are also about to start shipping to Canada direct from the site. Because our dollars are nearly equal in value now, it just makes sense for Canadian citizens to take the extra time to order from the US. It saves money in the long run even when the duty charge is taken into account.

We also have a new Contact page on the site that has greatly streamlined our handling of every day questions. Visitors can now more easily direct their questions to the proper division and get answers much quicker that way.

Speaking of every day questions, a while back we resolved to answer every single question asked to us on the phone and publish them on the web site. Even though the answers to these questions are there, it has become overwhelming just to sort through them all. As a result, we are still getting asked the same questions over the phone. But for those of you who do not mind reading a bit, every question you can think of will have an answer on the site.

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.

We have a new product out that has been very successful in only its 3rd week of availability. It’s the Sirus salt-free water softener system. As it’s name implies, it softens water without salt. As a matter of fact, it does not require regeneration at all. It contains the new Filtersorb SP media which renders hardness molecules inert and even dissolves any current hardness buildup in water pipes and fixtures. The installation could not be simpler. Water pipe in and water pipe out. Nothing to plug in, no salt tank and no drain to run.

Utilizing an up-flow technology, the water passes through the media and any hardness ions - calcium, lime - are molecularly altered rendering it inert to the point that it will not adhere to any surface. The result is soft water without actually removing or exchanging anything. You will use 50% less soap, laundry will be cleaner, calcium buildup in your pipes will disappear, and it’s actually good for the environment. The Sirus systems are legal even in softener discharge restricted locations because there is no discharge.

Find out all about this new technology. Filtersorb SP is the future of the water treatment industry.

We have been working on updating our installation and setup instructions for the products that we sell. We have a generic assembly and installation page that covers nearly every type of water softener or whole-house filter, but we also compile a list of specific questions that are emailed to us and we used that list to design this new, more specific guide.

We also tried to address some of the questions we get over the phone pertaining to this specific softener, but quite frankly it is difficult to compile a proper list of questions from people calling over the phone. In the first place most of the time we get calls from people that bought the system from a competitor or local dealer. We have no way of knowing what was included with the system or even what type of media it contains. So the phone call questions were discarded.

But this guide was created and compiled from hundreds of questions, and experiences with our Fleck model 5600 Econominder and if you read the whole thing, you’ll notice that we address common mistakes made by even professional installers. Check out the Fleck 5600 Installation and Setup Guide here. We will be producing more product specific guides each week and we’ll keep you posted here, so check back often.

Oh, and if you have any comments on this guide and future ones, please be sure to let me know!