Controlling Final Hardness, salt dosage, upflow brining questions

I wouldn't worry about regen frequency, unless you start going over 20-30 days. There are those that will argue frequency, but unless you have really nasty (dirty) water, I wouldn't worry about it too much. My family's use means I will regen about every 5-18 days.

A 1.5 cu ft resin tank will allow better salt usage, as Tom and others have said; I went with one for that very reason. The price difference is negligible.

The rinse water will contain about the same chlorine as the incoming water; chlorine will remain in solution unless you remove it chemically, or unless it precipitates out once exposed to air. I'm not a pool expert, but I seem to recal reading somewhere that soft water is not good for a gunite pool...

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Originally Posted by cgarai

Well thank you all for so much input.

I looked into salt dosage vs residual hardness leakage and found the link to the Purolite C100E resin. Looks like there is some leakage, but at least not much until you get to really low salt dosages.

As for the water heater, I read the warranty closer and they say this about water quality:

"WATER CHEMISTRY REQUIREMENTS – Sodium less than 20mGL.
Water pH between 6.0 and 8.0.
Hardness less than 7 grains.
Chlorine concentration less than 100 ppm."

I can see right away that I can't use sodium chloride. Also, here it states less than 7 gr/gal hardness, so reblending is not required. My pH however is right at the upper limit.

As far as my system, I think a 1 cuft system dosed at in the 5-6#/cuft will give adequate performance. Yes there are enough bathrooms and fixtures to exceed SFR of 9gpm. It won't happen often. If the guest bath starts getting used a lot then I can relatively inexpensively upgrade the tank. My concern here is more that I will have the metered regen being over ridden because we don't use enough water in 8 days.

I suppose an alternative would be to buy a bigger resin tank, but only load it with 1 cuft of resin and program the controller accordingly. If it turns out I need more capacity, all I have to do is add resin and reprogram. Does this make sense or is there a pitfall I haven't considered?

On another topic, which is likely to reveal a high level of ignorance: Does the rinse water from the regen cycle contain significant chlorine in it? Could it be dumped in a pool as part of the chlorine dose? Obviously it will have a significant amount of calcium in it, but I'm not sure how much in the context of a pool.

Thanks,

Chris

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Your raw water is likely to have more sodium than the 20 mg/l. And IIRC, it's the chloride that corrodes SS, or more than sodium does. IMO it would take either a long time to corrode SS enough to cause a problem in a water heater and I wouldn't worry about it IF I had to have a SS water heater.

Over running the SFR is not a good idea and you should get the correct sized softener and program it for the best salt efficiency it can give you. That's because you should want to get it done right the first time and gt on with life.

An metered 8 day regeneration is fairly efficient and if you program at 60 gals/day/person there won't be much capacity left in 8 days to worry about. To change to a larger tank measn you have to change parts in the control valve also. And the plumbing and buy more resin. It's a bad idea.

The softener drain water needs to go to the septic/sewer system, it is not good for a pool and will mess up the water chemistry due to the hardness possibly but more likely the salt.