Yes, true, I made an error on quoting. My apologies.
Yes, that's why I stated that and you seem to agree with me. Kinetics is not affected by valve. But valve performance, along with other aspects, does affect effeciency.
OK (more dancing on your part here) Andy... but what do you mean by "valve performance, along with other aspects affect efficiency"?
Get specific. Kinetics are a function of the resin and salt dose in lbs. The softener could be a manual regenerated with manual stop valves in the water and drain lines and no control valve; we still have kinetics. Kinetics actually get into SFR of the volume of resin Andy. Maybe you aren't thinking of the SFR of a softener.
I have no idea what you mean by "along with other aspects, so are you thinking that counter current brining has something to with the kinetics of resin or specifically what do you mean?
Just for fun:
How much water for regeneration does a Fleck 9000 with say, 1.5 cuft per tank, treating 35 grain-CH use? How many gallons will it have left for service before the next regen? What salt setting would you use and how many grains per pound would that be? I am sure you know more than me.
Andy, you didn't say what type of resin....
Anyway, I can get the salt efficiency down to whatever figure you want it to be. And I have three choices of resins; regular mesh, fine mesh and SST-60. In this (competitive) example, I could use SST-60 against your fine mesh but... SST-60's increased cost, or fine mesh for that matter, isn't going to be recovered by salt savings for many many years, so I would not suggest this to a prospective customer although I go over it with them so they understand the subject and their choices.
The water used per regeneration is dictated as to how I program the control valve for each of its cycle positions. That depends on how frequently I want to regenerate the resin. More frequent regenerations causes more friction wear on the resin beads and attrition, over once every 7-9 days harms resin too so...
How about I go for every 300 gallons like Kinetico does in many of their softeners? I'll get like 4500 grains/lb and use about 35 gallons of water.
OR... I can go like 900 gals between regenerations and 100 gallons of water and 8.5 lbs of salt with regular mesh (inexpensive) resin; that's 3411 grains/lb.
OR.... at the maximum salt dose of 15lbs/cuft; 22.5 lbs, I get 41500 usable grains (not counting the 3500 grains used for a regeneration), that's 1185 gallons between regenerations and still only use 100 gallons (*35 gpg=3500 grains) of water per regeneration. That's at the 2000 grain/lb efficiency setting.
BTW, that's using the 35 gpg hardness and if it changes, my customer just redoes the math and sets the gallons on the meter accordingly. It takes about 2 minutes. Also, the electric use for the 9x00 1.5 cuft (10" x 54" tanks) softener will be less than $3 per year.
The Kinetico customer can't do that flexibility thingy of changing how long between regenerations OR how many gallons it uses OR to change the CH if the iron or hardness or number in the family changes, unless they go to the local Kinetico dealer and get a new disc or two or get into teh salt tank to change the height of the float, right?
So now a few questions for you... how many times will the Kinetico softener I pictured above have to regenerate for a family of 4 with two teenagers? Or how many gallons between regenerations? How many lbs of salt per regeneration? What is the maximum salt dose in lbs per tank? What is the maximum grains of capacity per tank at the maximum salt dose per tank PER regeneration? What resin is being used? What is the volume of resin in each tank.
BTW, I have that 9x00 softener on my web site for a delivered price anywhere in the lower 48 of less than $1000 AND, it has a constant SFR (service flow rating) per tank of 12 gpm (only one tank allows water through it at a time).
As long as the household's peak demand does not go over 12 gpm, I expect 0 gpg soft water (I do it everyday Andy).
What is the constant SFR gpm of the Kinetico softener pictured above? And that should be with both the regular valve (one tank in service at a time like the 9x00) and the Quad valve with both tanks in service until one regenerates.
Gary says:
"It has 6" x 18" tanks filled with less than one half cuft total of fine mesh resin between both tanks, no gravel underbed, IIRC it is upflow service and it's downflow (co current) regenerated"
You may have made a mistake there. All Kinetico softeners use counter current regeneration. There are no exceptions except for the Hydrus Valve which can go either way...but that is s dofferent story. I am assuming you know what counter-current regeneration is and how it is different than co-current, right? I know that you have made a claim stating that I liad about all Kineticos being counter current. But that's OK if that's what you want to believe.
Well yes I made a mistake in the "(co current)" part but the upflow service and downflow brined parts are correct. Right?