Putting a properly sized water softener is a key to handle the hard water, neither too small or too big will work efficiently. The smallest size water softeners wear out early, need more money and time to be maintained, lessen flow rate and water pressure, and less softening capacity than usual. While the bigger water softeners cause damage to resin bed, infrequent regeneration cycles, and are expensive to buy. The question that arises here is what water softeners do I need? And what can you do to have the right size? Go through the below article to get the ideas.
6 Steps to properly size a Water Softener – Water Softener Capacity Setting
All the steps will be discussed in detail to provide you an in-depth knowledge of each to help you with what water softeners do I need? So that you can calculate the size in your own home. You can learn a few basics of water softeners, how they are beneficial in daily life.
1. Determine the hardness level of water
Guessing the water hardness will lead to improper sizing, instead of that look for the classification of water-based upon the concentration of calcium and magnesium measured as ppm (parts per million) and mg/l or gpg (grains per gallon) by using best water testing kits.
Classification |
Mg/L |
Ppm |
gpg |
Soft |
0-60 |
0-60 |
0-3.5 |
Moderately hard |
61-120 |
61-120 |
3.5-7.0 |
Hard |
121-180 |
121-180 |
7.0-10.5 |
Very hard |
>180 |
>180 |
>10.5 |
2. Estimate daily consumption of water
Take your water bill and check the consumption amount yearly, monthly, or quarterly through which you can find the average of daily consumption. However, if you don’t have access to this kind of information, simply multiply the number of people by 80 (if your love to conserve water) or multiply by 100 (if you love to take long baths). Moreover, e.g., if you consume 45000 gallons of water per quarter (90 days), that means 500 gallons/per day are consumed.
3. Analyze flow rates
At how many places you and your family are using water simultaneously? Like, bathtub, flush, and two sinks are running at the same time? Or maybe more if more persons are at home. When it comes to flow rates don’t undersize your water softeners; if a water softener is too small than flowrates, you will experience iron bleed and low water pressure.
4. Calculate regular softening requirement
This means how many hardness grains a water softener has to remove daily from water that can be obtained by multiplying the per day consumption with a hardness level of water (Softening Requirement = Daily water usage x hardness level of water). For example, if hardness if 10gpg and daily usage are 500 gallons/day, then potential water softener has to remove 5000 grains each day.
5. Check mandatory total grain capacity
Generally, water softeners remove hardness grains before regenerations (washing the minerals and recharging resin bed) as per the working of softeners, after a certain point of time, all resin beads are saturated and unable to catch more mineral concentrations. To protect the headwall against wear, conserving the resin from iron, low waste water production, and high optimal efficiency in balance, experts recommend every 6-7 days to regenerate the softener. Multiply softening requirement 5000 grains/day by 7 days; you will get softening capacity 35,000grains/week.
6. Consider the efficiency of salt
Are you thinking that regenerating after every 7 weeks will leads to nu run out of soft water without considering the ability of salt, aka brine efficiency? Not at all, 100% regeneration of softening bed will need a high amount of salt in this disproportionate amount while the partial restoration is helpful. So, the higher the softening capacity, the higher the salt does, the lower will be efficiency per pound of salt. However, more servicing leads to convenient days in which less salt will be drained out that would threaten the sewage system of aquatic life. 100% regeneration of softener is necessary. It will exhaust early; it is better to adopt a bigger system with higher grain capacity.
Therefore, if you are still wondering about what size softeners do I need? You can simply use the calculators available online as below that would help you in finding the exact value. However, you have to consider the above-given steps before using the calculators so that you have adequate knowledge of sizing requirements, the hardness of water, flow rates, regeneration capacity, and operational efficiency of softener. It’s incredibly important to buy the best water softeners through a buying guide, which has significant features and qualities.
