PRODUCTS > Water Softening and Ion Exchange Systems
Water Softeners – How They Work
If there are stains or build up on your sinks, showers and baths, if you have to use large amounts of soap to clean dishes or wash your hair, or if your water tastes or smells odd, you probably have hard water. Hard water is water that contains dissolved minerals like calcium, magnesium, sulphur, iron, lead and limestone in excessive amounts. This can have a negative impact on your health, your household or industrial plant, and your wallet. Hard water produces scale. If left untreated, the minerals in hard water will cause yellow stains on plumbing fixtures and will be deposited as scale, eventually clogging plumbing and shortening the life of appliances like geysers, solar panels, washing machines, ice makers, air conditioners and dishwashers. In industrial boilers, for example, the deposits act as an insulation that impairs the flow of heat into water, reducing the heating efficiency and allowing the metal boiler components to overheat. In a pressurized system, this can lead to failure of the boiler.
Scale deposits not only cut down on the efficiency of these appliances and systems, they cost you money, increasing both energy and maintenance bills.
Water softening systems provide the solution. They reduce the dissolved calcium and magnesium using ion-exchange resin systems. The resin inside the fibreglass pressure vessel is regenerated using a saline solution from the brine tank. Our systems use Runxin® multi-functional automatic softener control valves, providing easy installation, programmable automatic regeneration, backwashing, and flushing controlled by either time or flow. The heads are low maintenance and also have a manual function should power outages occur.
Ion Exchange Systems – How They Work
The water to be treated passes through a bed of the resin. Negatively-charged resins absorb and bind metal ions, which are positively charged. The resins initially contain univalent hydrogen, sodium or potassium ions, which exchange with divalent calcium and magnesium ions in the water. As the water passes through the resin column, the hardness ions replace the hydrogen, sodium or potassium ions which are released into the water. The "harder" the water, the more hydrogen, sodium or potassium ions are released from the resin and into the water.
As these resins become loaded with undesirable cations and anions, they gradually lose their effectiveness and must be regenerated. If a cationic resin is used (to remove calcium and magnesium ions) then regeneration is usually effected by passing concentrated brine, usually made of sodium chloride or potassium chloride, or hydrochloric acid solution through them. For anionic resins a solution of sodium or potassium hydroxide is used. Most of the salts used for regeneration get flushed out of the system during the backwashing process. By controlling the frequency of regeneration and the amount of reagent used for each regeneration, the effect of releasing salt water into the environment can be minimised.
CG37 Design Studio