Product and company review: CAI Technologies water softener...
One of the things we needed to fix in our new home in Paradise, Utah
was the water softener. The old softener was leaking brine (ugh!) and
also some of its resin beads were making it into the house water. These
beads clogged up basically every faucet and shower head in the house,
greatly reducing the rate of water flow. I had a plumber come out and
inspect the old softener (a 24,000 grain single tank Aqua-Pure model),
just in case it was something simple and inexpensive to fix. It wasn't.
So
... it was time for me to start researching water softeners. We have
never owned a home that had one before, so I've never really had any
idea how they worked. The whole “add salt and your water gets better”
part was a mystery to me. Fortunately there are numerous excellent web
sites that explain all this, and in a short while I actually understood
how these things worked. But I still didn't know which one I should
get, and there are a bazillion choices. My next tactic was to start
reading water conditioning bulletin boards and blogs, and there are
quite a few of them. I quickly got to several concrete recommendations,
based on the experience of quite a few installers. The big ones:
- Fleck controller.
This is a brand of controller – the usage meter, electronics, and
valves that control the operation of the water softener. There are
several manufacturers of these, but the Fleck products are the consensus
“good stuff”.
- Twin tank. This is a more expensive route to go, as there is
an additional resin tank and double the resin beads. However, there
are multiple advantages to it. First, your system has double the total
capacity (that is, number of gallons of hard water that can be softened
before a brine wash is needed). Second, the regeneration job is done
with soft water (coming from the tank that's not being
regenerated) instead of hard water (which a single tank system must
do). This results in a better job of regeneration. But third, and to
me most important, is that the system is never off-line for the
regeneration – one tank is regenerated while the other continues to
supply softened water to the house. This means that we can go to a
purely metered system (a tank is only regenerated when it is actually
needed, as opposed to being on a schedule). The two hour regeneration
process won't affect us at all.
- High capacity. I discovered that “buying up” the total
capacity is relatively inexpensive and results in much longer times
between regenerations, and less wear-and-tear on the controller. The
capacity is measured in “grains” of calcium removed from the hard
water. Small units may be 16,000 or 24,000 grains capacity; large
residential units are 64,000 grains. With a twin tank system, that
doubles – so a large residential unit would be 128,000 grains total
capacity.
Then I needed to choose a supplier. After a lot of research on
the bulletin boards and blogs, and also with Amazon's product reviews, I
settled on CAI Technologies. They have a reputation for solid products
and good service, and they had
a unit that was exactly what I was looking for. I ordered it directly from them.
Three
days later, UPS dropped off 7 or 8 boxes containing the parts and
pieces of our new water softener. I arranged for a local plumber to
come out and install it a week later, and then I unpacked and inspected
all the parts. It all looked great – the right stuff and all looked
well made – except that they had shipped me the wrong controller. Dang.
Well,
anyone can make a mistake. What really matters is how they handled
it. I called CAI, and within 30 seconds I was connected to an actual
tech – someone intimately familiar with their products and how they're
used. He had me do a couple of checks to verify my belief that I had
the wrong controller. I did. Then he said the magic words:
“Well,
we’re going to fix this right now. We’ll ship you the right one by
overnight express today, and we’ll arrange for a pickup of the wrong
one. Our apologies for screwing this up. Let us know if there’s
anything else we need to do to make this right.”
I
can't ask for anything better than that. CAI did exactly as promised.
The next day I had the right controller in my hands, and the day after
that UPS picked up the old (wrong) one to return to them. By the time
the plumber arrived, I had all the right stuff. He installed it, we
tested it, and all looked good.
That was a week ago.
I've now gone through two startup regeneration cycles (manually
initiated) and one automatic regeneration cycle (because we used enough
water to consume the capacity of one of the tanks). It works
flawlessly. I've tested the water before and after softening: before
it's 23 grains/gallon (fairly hard), after it's 0 grains/gallon
(perfectly soft). There are no brine leaks, and no resin beads are
escaping into our water supply.
Good product, good company, great service. Recommended!
