Jim, Going back to a previous post of yours... "One more thing I would like to add before we go further, I don't really believe the internet guy I bought the tank with really had any effect on the size of the tank I wanted, the size of the tank was based on what the first guy that came out to the house told me. Its about a 50 year old shallow well hookup well and from working in this area he believes my well might not last as long as the tank so he suggested the 1.5 in thinking not to long from now I will need a new well drilled that will be a deep well where the water conditions will be a lot worse then I have now. Hope that clears some things up and you understand. That is why the unit might be oversized for now but not for the life of the unit". Water treatment, softening in specific, is chemistry, physics, and arithmetic... nothing more and nothing less. A correctly sized softener is based on specific water test results, water usage, and hardness removal capacity and calculated for an exact solution. There is no latitude that allows for over-sizing. There is a correctly sized softener and no other size softener will perform with efficiency and competence and not introduce side effects. A correctly sized softener that is subsequently faced with changed water conditions or higher water usage will simply regenerate more often, BUT still regenerate with salt efficiency and make the resin's life as smooth and easy as can be. If your water conditions change DRAMATICALLY then the cost of a new tank and resin will be pennies compared to the cost of a new well. In the meantime you'd have wasted enough money at the seller's salt setting to pay for a new (correctly sized for the new water conditions) softener if you needed one. Your (too large) softener is not operating at the efficiency that a correctly sized softener would and channeling and resin problems are problems that shouldn't even be possibilities but are now based on your sizing decision. Keep watching for hardness leak through (just before regen) and let us know how things go down the road.

I need some information in order to help you program your softener to best salt/water efficiency. Your actual water hardness. Neighborhood consensus from a bunch of folks that are guessing won't cut it. If you haven't tested the water, is this information provided on your city water report? Number of people in your home. Do you have any iron in your water (that will dramatically change the number we need to use for hardness) How much resin is in your softener in cubic ft. Softener suppliers tend to play fast and loose with capacity numbers. Cubic ft will give us a real number to deal with. What specific resin do you have? If you don't know that - what vendor did you order your softener from? Brine connection - you should not be able to easily pull the tubing out. Call your vendor to get this problem rectified.

Low pH makes iron removal more difficult IF you are using an oxidation/filtration method for removal, which you are not. Higher pH drives ferrous iron (soluble, clear-water) to ferric iron (insoluble). In oxidation/filtration iron removal this is a good thing. In a softener, this is precisely what we try to mitigate. Lower pH will make ion exchange (this is how your softener works) iron removal EASIER as it will help slow formation of ferric iron and reduce resin fouling. However, anything lower that a 6 will cause serious damage to metal pipes and fixtures. A neutral pH of 7 is ideal. At any rate, check your pH and let's see what we're dealing with. Using a test strip for pH testing is fine.

Rory, Your notion of the beads being less charged is essentially correct. The higher the salt dose, the higher the portion of ion exchange sites on each resin bead that get converted back to the sodium form. As hard water flows through the resin bed, the chance of passing close enough to a sodium ion are higher if there are more of them available. Technically, absolute zero hardness is not possible with a single stage softener. However, hardness bleed is very low. The lower the regen salt dose, the more hardness bleed you will get. Unless you go to extremes, that bleed will remain well below 1 gpg, even for cheaply-made resins. The resin you have will keep hardness bleed below 1 ppm even at ridiculously low salt dosages. Some folks can feel a slight difference in the water with 1 ppm of hardness, but most won't notice. There is a trade-off between salt efficiency and water efficiency. If you chart them, the sweet spot where the two cross is at a salt dose of 6 lb/cu ft. As you lower salt dose, you will use less salt, but a bit more water and a bit more wear on the softener. For your purposes, on an annual basis, the difference between a dose of 4.5 and a dose of 8 is 216 lb salt and 500 gallons of water, about 9 regen cycles. You will need to weigh those items and decide for yourself. Regardless of what you choose to do with regard to salt dose, your day override should be the same. Day override has everything to do with water conditions, and should not be used to set hardness capacity. Setting the day override equal to the time you expect from the capacity defeats the purpose of the dual control of a correctly programmed softener. I don't prefer to cut it thin - I give people what they ask for (unless they ask for impossible things or are rude) rather than what I might prefer.