RE: Water softeners

[Paul Gale <groups2@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I guess you could use a probe but that might be far too complex.

My softener has two chambers for the two blocks of salt and both are
partially submerged at the same time - so they go down at roughly the same
rate - so an optical sensor at a low point, looking across/through both
blocks would work for me - and the softener has dual chambers so one is
recharging while the other is in use - so no issues there for my situation.

So it'd be a salt low type indication - maybe linked into the house system
and also a locally positioned LED or indication on a touch screen :)

Paul.



-----Original Message-----
From: ukha_d@xxxxxxx [mailto:ukha_d@xxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Simon
Haslam
Sent: 18 May 2011 13:14
To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
Subject: RE: [ukha_d] Water softeners

Ah yes, that's on my list for when the round tuit arrives! For the dual
chamber metered softeners (like Kenetico/Crown/Harveys) it's a real pain if
you notice the water has gone hard again (we normally see it on tea) since
you need to regenerate both chambers (i.e. do one, wait overnight for the
water in the machine to get salty, do another).

I was wondering if you could use a probe to measure the conductivity of the
water (i.e. saltiness) inside the bottom of the softener? Then maybe below
a certain threshold it could trigger a signal on a 1-wire sensor. That
said, maybe optical is closer to what others will have done already, e.g.
reading gas meters.


Simon

--- On Wed, 18/5/11, Paul Gale wrote:

From: Paul Gale <groups2@xxxxxxx>
Subject: RE: [ukha_d] Water softeners
To: "ukha_d@xxxxxxx" <ukha_d@xxxxxxx>
Date: Wednesday, 18 May, 2011, 11:04

Adding an HA relevance to this topic - I've found it a pain to remember to
add new salt blocks every few weeks. You can tell when it's run out as the
water feels so different in the shower etc. I was thinking of adding a salt
level sensor and feeding that into my HA system (probably directly into
HomeVision). Was thinking of an optical sensor across the salt block area.
Anyone done this with one of these types of softener?


------------------------------------