Micro
New Member
New guy but I've lurked a long time and hopefully learned something
I spent my working career building water, wastewater, and water reclamation plants for cities, counties, and the state, but this small scale treatment is a different world entirely
I'll try to include all the relevant info.
2 (and only ever 2) old folks, 1 retired and home all day, 1 still working full time and gone 10-12 hours a day.
We have a new on-demand electric water heater, so we want to keep line deposits to the absolute minimum.
Water quality (Central Florida well water) -
0.9 mg/L Iron
<0.1 mg/L Hydrogen Sulfide
<0.1 mg/L Tannins
181 mg/L TDS
110 mg/L (6.43 gpg) Hardness
7.8 pH
0.019 mg/L Nitrate
13 mg/L Chloride
We just recently (3 months ago) switched from a "big box" store water softener to a Fleck unit -
Fleck 2510SXT (1" in and out)
48,000 grain unit
10" x 54" Tank
1.5 cu. ft. Fine Mesh Softening Resin (just the 2 of us and the highest flow is a tub occasionally, shower usually)
Morton Clean and Protect Rust Defense water softening pellets (formally called Rust Remover)
BLFC : 0.5 gpm
DLFC : 2.4 gpm
Our settings on the Fleck 2510Sxt are -
(shooting for salt lb/cu.ft. = 7)
DF = Gal ; Units
VT = dF2b ; Downflow/Upflow, Double Backwash
CT = Fd ; Meter Delayed regen trigger
NT = 1; Number of tanks
C = 32.0 ; capacity in 1000 grains
H = 14 ; Hardness grains after compensation
RS = SF ; Safety Factor
SF = 10 ; percent
DO = 14 ; Day Override
RT = 1:00 ; Regen time (default 2 AM)
B1 = 8 ; Backwash 1 (minutes)
Bd = 60 ; Brine draw minutes
B2 = 5 ; Backwash 2 (minutes)
RR = 10 ; Rapid Rinse minutes
BF = 7 ; Brine fill minutes
FM = t1.0 ; 1" Turbine meter
Our concern is that about the 7 day mark we begin see some slight reddening in the toilet bowl (ferric iron?) and also a definite darkening toward blackish in the bowl (manganese?).
(We failed to test for manganese, but surrounding wells in our area are in the 8-14 mg/L range)
EDIT : I dug back through my paperwork and this is wrong. The manganese levels of my neighbors are 0.008 and 0.014 mg/L. Sorry for the confusion.
It does progress very slowly, but we would like to eliminate it altogether.
This staining doesn't occur in the toilet tank, just the bowl.
There are some lingering iron slime deposits on the metal in the tank, but those are gradually disappearing.
The dishwasher has a SS tub and it shows a "rainbow" stain, if that helps?
We don't want to use a filter cartridge system, as we tried that with our old softener and it just went through 20" cartridges ($) and made little difference.
We are on a septic tank so we really don't want to use chlorine on a regular basis.
We were thinking a Catalytic Carbon filter ahead of the water softener (?) or is there something we could change in our settings without running up our salt costs a lot?
I spent my working career building water, wastewater, and water reclamation plants for cities, counties, and the state, but this small scale treatment is a different world entirely
I'll try to include all the relevant info.
2 (and only ever 2) old folks, 1 retired and home all day, 1 still working full time and gone 10-12 hours a day.
We have a new on-demand electric water heater, so we want to keep line deposits to the absolute minimum.
Water quality (Central Florida well water) -
0.9 mg/L Iron
<0.1 mg/L Hydrogen Sulfide
<0.1 mg/L Tannins
181 mg/L TDS
110 mg/L (6.43 gpg) Hardness
7.8 pH
0.019 mg/L Nitrate
13 mg/L Chloride
We just recently (3 months ago) switched from a "big box" store water softener to a Fleck unit -
Fleck 2510SXT (1" in and out)
48,000 grain unit
10" x 54" Tank
1.5 cu. ft. Fine Mesh Softening Resin (just the 2 of us and the highest flow is a tub occasionally, shower usually)
Morton Clean and Protect Rust Defense water softening pellets (formally called Rust Remover)
BLFC : 0.5 gpm
DLFC : 2.4 gpm
Our settings on the Fleck 2510Sxt are -
(shooting for salt lb/cu.ft. = 7)
DF = Gal ; Units
VT = dF2b ; Downflow/Upflow, Double Backwash
CT = Fd ; Meter Delayed regen trigger
NT = 1; Number of tanks
C = 32.0 ; capacity in 1000 grains
H = 14 ; Hardness grains after compensation
RS = SF ; Safety Factor
SF = 10 ; percent
DO = 14 ; Day Override
RT = 1:00 ; Regen time (default 2 AM)
B1 = 8 ; Backwash 1 (minutes)
Bd = 60 ; Brine draw minutes
B2 = 5 ; Backwash 2 (minutes)
RR = 10 ; Rapid Rinse minutes
BF = 7 ; Brine fill minutes
FM = t1.0 ; 1" Turbine meter
Our concern is that about the 7 day mark we begin see some slight reddening in the toilet bowl (ferric iron?) and also a definite darkening toward blackish in the bowl (manganese?).
(We failed to test for manganese, but surrounding wells in our area are in the 8-14 mg/L range)
EDIT : I dug back through my paperwork and this is wrong. The manganese levels of my neighbors are 0.008 and 0.014 mg/L. Sorry for the confusion.
It does progress very slowly, but we would like to eliminate it altogether.
This staining doesn't occur in the toilet tank, just the bowl.
There are some lingering iron slime deposits on the metal in the tank, but those are gradually disappearing.
The dishwasher has a SS tub and it shows a "rainbow" stain, if that helps?
We don't want to use a filter cartridge system, as we tried that with our old softener and it just went through 20" cartridges ($) and made little difference.
We are on a septic tank so we really don't want to use chlorine on a regular basis.
We were thinking a Catalytic Carbon filter ahead of the water softener (?) or is there something we could change in our settings without running up our salt costs a lot?
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