Resin and sizing question.

[Mike_A]

Hi, did some research so hopefully I somewhat understand my needs but wanted to ask a couple questions before buying a softener system. I'm moving into a new home with a well. I purchased a Hanna Labs harness and iron test kit. My hardness reads 111PPM which converted to grains is around 6.5. The iron test did not show any iron present or at least less than 1mg/l of iron. Did not perform PH test yet.

My home has 2 baths and there is only me and my wife with occasional guests. So my math is 75 gal/day x 2 persons = 150 gallon/day x 7 (hardness) = 1050 x 7 days = 7350 grains a week. So from what I read about water softener efficiency I only need a .5 cu ft. unit, to regenerate in almost 10 days.
If my math is correct, that seems pretty small. Did I size it correctly?

My other question is the resin to use. I read that most well water supplied softeners should use fine mesh resin, but with such low iron numbers should I just stick with 8% crosslinked. Any benefits to the fine mesh resin with such low iron?

Thanks for the help.
Mike

 

[Reach4]

If the inside of your toilet tanks is not rust-colored, then you could trust the iron test.

Never use the nominal grains rating on softener marketing literature for math. I'm not saying that you did that-- I think you probably did not.
https://terrylove.com/forums/index.php?threads/help-for-programming-fleck-5810.82673/#post-595983 has some numbers for you.

I see no reason to go smaller than 1 cuft of resin, but I agree that based on capacity, 0.5 cuft looks adequate. But the bigger capacity will support a bigger flow rate. With 0.5 cuft, the water will not be in contact with the beads as long at a given flow rate.

 

[Sponsor]

 

[Mike_A]

Thanks Reach, Yes you're correct I did not use the nominal grain sizing but used the approximate efficiency sizing. So I'll go with the 1 cuft size.

The house is only a couple months but I don't see any rust color forming as of yet. Might need to wait a while, cause I'm not sure how long it takes, if it were to start forming rust. Can you please comment on using the fine mesh vs the crosslinked resin in my case?

Thanks.

 

[Treeman]

West of you, near Lansing, my iron content is just under 1ppm and rust stains will show up daily with no treatment. Consider yourself lucky to have relatively low hardness and no iron. Can't help with the resin question, but I spent 20 minutes reading threads under a search of "fine mesh resin" and the replies by the pros here tend to favor not using fine mesh unless you are dealing with special circumstances. My 5 year old softener is doing well with regular 8% resin and the one before that lasted over 18 years. I'm a weekend warrior, non expert.

 

[Mike_A]

Thanks for the reply Treeman. I’m actually asking about a new home I had built west of you near Holland. I’m pretty sure I’m ordering a system with a Flex 5600SXT and 32000 grain capacity with the standard 8% resin like you mentioned. I just tested the PH level and it looks to be around 7.5 which shouldn’t have a bearing on what I need.