Power Outage Question

[brianjcollins]

I'm putting in a transfer switch for my generator and have a question. My utility room in the lowest level of my house uses an ejector pump. During the outage I plan on powering my well pump, but not the ejector pump. Not a problem for usage as I wont use my lowest level. My issue is the softener recharge on the lowest level. It's on a breaker that I wont be powering. I don't want the unit to recharge nightly as the ejector wont be powered either. Do I need to put the water softener into bypass mode or it being off power is good enough to stop the water run off?

I want to develop a checksheet for power outage and include every step detailed. If I need to hit the bypass, it's fine, it is just a step I would like to avoid.

Thanks!
Brian

[Akpsdvan]

You could either put it in bypass or unplug the power head from the wall.
Bypass the unit and untreated water goes into the house, unplugging it will let the unit treat the water and hold the cleaning cycle till you have full power back to the house.
The unplugging the power to the unit might have the unit run over the treatment gallons while you are on the gen.. but would not have the unit put water into the hole for the ejector pump to run.

[brianjcollins]

Awesome, thank you for the quick response.

That answer was exactly what I was looking for!

Brian

[Akpsdvan]

What if it was not the answer that you where looking for?

What kind of water do you have?
Iron and hardness?
The quality of the water may play apart as to which path you do for the softener when the power goes out.

[brianjcollins]

I guess I should have said 'hoping' instead of looking... I would have done what needed to be done for it to work sufficiently.

If I had to use two of the breakers on the transfer switch to power both the ejector and water softner I would have. Not doing that is mostly out of convience of having other things powered in my house.

I need to get my water tested as I am using the same settings the previous owner used.

[brianjcollins]

The softener wont be on a powered circuit so there will be no need to unplug it. Also, it's not a standby wholehouse generator. It will have to be plugged in and fired up with breakers being flipped from line to gen. So there is a setup proccess, just trying to make it as easy as possible.

[jnaas2]

What size generator do you have, and what are you planning on running with it

[Water Dude]

The first thing that came to mind with me was the fact that there is an injector system. That means some serious problems with the water and to ignor the injector when the power goes off could be causing a lot more problems. What does the injector control? Iron, bacteria or h2s?

[hj]

It is "ejector" meaning a pump for the lower level sewage. The only problem with not powering the softener would be if it were in regeneration mode when the transfer occurred. Then it would continue to flow water into the ejector basin until power was restored and it could finish its cycle. Flooding could occur long before that happens. The timer would have to be reset after any power disruption, and possibly other settings as well depending on the duration of the outage.

[Gary Slusser]

A problem with by passing a softener and allowing it to be powered on is that with calendar override turned on, it will go through the motions of regenerating but with no water no regenration will be done and the control will reset the meter. So the softener will eventually be producing hard water and the same for day timer time clock models because it won't regenerate until the next 'regen day' on the pin wheel. Both mean you get the gallons or number of days between regenerations times two.

To stop those problems you should unplug the softener and bypass it. And if it were me, and I was powering my well pump, I'd power my softener; they usually have a max 3 watt motor running a clock. Ad the ejector pump should be able to run off your generator.