Ok, water softener 101 ... First, get a complete water test from an independent lab. This is a MUST DO because without it everything is a guess. A quickie water test from Sears or a water softener company won't be complete. They only test for the "profitable" stuff. Second, hit the Yellow Pages and call at least three local water treatment pros. Make sure you call at least one of the big dogs like Kinetico or Culligan and at least a couple independent pros. DON'T TELL THEM YOU HAD YOUR WATER TESTED. Give each an opportunity to offer suggestions and provide you with a quote to meet your water treatment needs. IGNORE ANY THAT DON'T TEST YOUR WATER THEMSELVES as they can't speak intelligently to water treatment without knowing what needs to be treated. Ask lots of questions. Warranty, parts & labor, how long? Install, permits required, licensed plumber? Routine maintenance and costs? Do they stock parts? Response time for emergency (water leak) calls? If they don't explain things to your satisfaction that is a good indicator of how you'll be treated after the sale. After they've gone use your water test to compare with their's. Are all your treatment needs being addressed? Ask your neighbors if they have any water treatment experience. They might tell you who's good or who to avoid. Come back here and post the specific recommendations and hardware with the costs and we'll give you our opinions. If you're a DIYer then you have other options and here's a good place to start ... http://ohiopurewaterco.com/shop/customer/home.php?cat=179 These other threads may interest you ... http://forum.doityourself.com/showthread.php?t=284967 http://forum.doityourself.com/showthread.php?t=285326 The negatives regarding the pre-built softeners are ... Lower quality materials, mostly ABS which ages and becomes brittle. ABS does not do well with really hard water. On 3 gr hardness city water most any softener will give a decent service life BUT harder water than that seperates the pre-built box store softeners from the quality ones. While all ion exchange water softeners use resin and "tanks" there's a big difference in the resin and resin "tanks". Again, the pre-built softeners do not use the top quality resin from companies like Purolite or Ionac and the materials their resin "tanks" are made of are not the same quality as the Structural brand (10 year warranty) resin tanks the top quality softeners come with. Most of the parts are proprietary and available from limited sources and they tend to be expensive. The pre-built softeners are "cabinet" (all-in-one) designs and are much harder to work on. The cabinet design puts the resin tank inside the brine tank. The routine cleaning of the brine tank is more difficult and takes a lot more time than a conventional design softener but the Sears type does take less floor space (the ONLY advantage in it's design). The greatest falsehhood is that pre-built BOX store softeners are less expensive than the industry standard softeners. The Sears softeners around 40000 hardness capacity generally run a little under $500. For $466 you can have a Fleck 5600SE electronic on demand metered softener delivered to your home including shipping. You'll need to assemble it (takes less than 30 minutes) and install it. You can have a plumber assemble it and install it (you'd need a plumber to install the Sears softener also or DIY). You'll get a control valve that has proved it's reliability over 20+ years, is made of state of the art materials (Noryl) which does not turn brittle and is totally inert. You'll get a 5 year warranty on the control valve and ten year warranty on the resin tank. You can buy parts for the Fleck control valve locally or all over the internet. Complete parts and service/repair manuals are available for download and there is always someone everywhere who can service Fleck control valves as they are the long established industry standard AND they are as easy OR easier to program than the pre-built softeners. They tolerate the hardest water with no problem. Real softeners generally last 20+ years EVEN on ludicrously hard water while the service life on a pre-built softener seems to be under 5 years (if you're lucky) on really hard water and lasting longer than that is a rare exception. Sears, GE, Waterboss, North Star and the like are the most commonly complained about water softeners on this forum and all over the internet. The Fleck, Autotrol, and Clack water softeners just work and work and work and work and work ... Why buy a lesser quality water softener for more money?

pH: You are correct - it should be raised. Doing so should eliminate your green deposits. Manganese will not be affected by the pH change. There are three methods for increasing pH. 1) calcite/corosex blend (90:10 ratio). If your water pH was greater than 6, you would only need calcite. Since your pH is closer to 5, you will need the blend. This feeder consists of a tank and control valve (the same type used for softeners). It would backwash periodically and would need to be recharged every several years with more calcite blend. This will increase the hardness of your water. 2) soda ash feeder. This would consist of a mix tank, chemical feed pump, contact tank and flow meter. You would have to dissolve 2 - 3 lb soda ash per gallon of water. This system works very well, but would require much more effort on your part. It will not change the hardness of your water. 3) Sodium hydroxide feeder: This method is most applicable with extremely low pH and would require you to deal with a very caustic chemical so I wouldn't recommend it for the average homeowner. Since you have the pool and spa, coupled with water that is not very hard right now, I recommend option 1. You will need to get a larger softener, but you will already need that to get the flow rate you want anyway. There is a caveat with this recommendation, however. Calcite blend has a service flow rate of 3 - 6 gpm/sqft and a required backwash flow rate of 8-12 gpm/sqft. You will need to determine the max flow you can achieve at the location where you will place the equipment. If you have a spigot at your pressure tank, that is the place to get a flow rate. A bucket of know volume and a stopwatch will do the trick. Determine your max flow to start and then we can go from there.

Sodium is not salt. Salt is sodium chloride. During softener regeneration sodium ions are exchanged with calcium ions but the chloride part of the sodium chloride that makes it a SALT goes to drain. There is no salt in softened water. By rust do you mean a white crusty deposit or brown RUST like when a tool is left in the rain? Posting a picture of the rust would help us see what you're seeing. If you scrape off some of the rust(?) and put it in a dish and add a little white vinegar or LimeAway does it fizz?

==I guess part of my confusion is over the term "backwash" and "drainage water"== Backwash is a term specific to DE filters. The term refers to when you reverse the flow of water through the filter grid to clean it. You open a drain line when doing this so that the backwash blows through the filter and straight out the drain line into the yard. This backwash is treated poolwater plus whatever debris was in the filter grid and many cities don't want that in the storm water system. Discharging pool water on the other hand is just basically pumping your poolwater out through a hose. You wouldn't dechlorinate before backwashing (plus backwashing is a more frequent process, it's normal maintenance for DE), so that's why Dallas views the two processes differently. ==my city strictly prohibits putting backwash water into the sanitary sewer--which the Dallas ordinance specifically requires...== Oh sorry, I thought you said you were in Dallas but looking again I see you said "DFW". You are correct, you should go by whatever your town or city codes state. Most do not allow discharging anything other than sewage into the SS system because doing so overloads the water treatment plant. I'm surprised Dallas allows it. ==what do you do when something like a couple of years ago happens and we have like 30 days of rain in a row.. everyone's pool is discharging water right and left in conditions like that...== There's so much fresh water (rain water) diluting it that the effects of the overflowing poolwater are negligable on the environment. Usually in those deluge conditions there are bigger problems from the sewage treatment plants flooding and discharging raw sewage into waterways (yuck!) Just curious, why are you asking? Do you have to repair the pool, or maybe your CYA level has gotten too high and you're doing a partial drain/ refill?