Would have been more considerate for you to start a new thread rather than pollute someone else's thread when your post has nothing to do with the thread's content. Regarding your water problems... There are a variety of less effective ways to attempt to treat water which you seem to have discovered but it really is as easy as 1-2-3 1. Certified lab test to determine what needs to be treated. 2. Have a water treatment professional evaluate the environment and decide on the most inclusive and comprehensive treatment and hardware required. 3. Have a water treatment professional install and configure the equipment for correct and efficient operation.

You would only need to change the hardness setting. At 30 gpg with 3 people in your home, assuming 60 gallons/person/day, you will have 5400 grains per day. The sweet spot between water efficiency and salt efficiency happens at 6 lb salt/cuft resin, regenerating about every 7 days. At that salt dosage, a 2 cuft softener has a capacity of 42,000. Now we take off 15% for a safety factor. We do this because we set up the softener to regen at a convenient time in the middle of the night and you want soft water right up until regen time. This places your regen every 6 - 8 days. At 12 gpg that same 2 cuft softener would regen every 16 days. Now, if you go with a 1.5 cuft softener, 12 gpg regens every 12 and 30 gpg regens every 5. While it is technically possible to size the softener smaller, you have a fairly large house with many bathrooms. When we try to choose the most appropriate softener size, we want to ensure that the softener is large enough to accommodate the use of several fixtures at once without negative impact on flow and without causing slugs of hard water during high-water-use times. For example: You don't want your shower to turn into a trickle if a toilet gets flushed in another bathroom. At the same time, we don't want to size the softener too large or you run the risk of channeling (where water runs through only a small portion of the softener rather than distributed across the resin bed). If it were my home, I would go with the 1.5 cuft softener if I only had to change the settings twice per year. If, however, hardness changes frequently and without notice, I would go with a 2.0 cuft softener and leave it set for 30 gpg.

A 1.5 cu ft softener would regenerate about every 3 days at it's maximum hardness removal capability and the least efficient salt dose. That would cost you a lot in wasted water (60 gallons) and 22 lbs of salt every regen. That's 220 lbs, that's 5.5 bags, every month and 600 gallons of water when it should be around 40 lbs a week or 160 lbs (4 bags) and 240 gallons of water a month. What does the web site selling Fleck softeners recommend as far as size? It's most probably a single resin tank softener not a twin resin tank model. Your private guy is an independent water treatment company and could sell Fleck but he's shown he knows little about correctly sizing a softener regardless of the control valve. You can buy a softener online but by definition there is no service and the warranty is parts only. Parts, if needed, will always be FedEx or UPS away, and you'll be responsible for assembling, installing, and setting up the softener. Get the Kinetico dealer in there to give you a quote and we'll look at your options.

Consider that you might have gotten the "newbie" on the phone. Call back and ask the same question of another rep and see if they give you the same answer. Fleck says the 5600 is limited to a 12" tank so no sales person gets to change the specs. Step 8 = 48,000 Step 12 = 8 (days calendar override) Step 17 = In order to program this step you need to know the BLFC size. If the BLFC is .5 gal/min, which is common, then each gallon = 3 lbs of salt. At 1/2 gpm, 5 gallons = 10 minutes so set step 17 at 12 minutes (fudge factor or reserve, whatever definition makes you happy). "I ask because when I buy a 2.5 cube softener, it will surely be called a "80,000 grain softener" even though your recommendation is to program it like a 48,000 softener"... for the LAST TIME, if you refer to the softener as a 2.5 cu ft softener then so will the sales person and there will be NO MISUNDERSTANDING about what you are ordering. A 2.5 cube softener can be marketed as an 80k softener but you'll be using 15 lbs of salt per cu ft to get that 80k. That's 37.5 pounds of salt each regeneration versus getting 48k at 6 lbs per cu ft or 15 pounds of salt each regeneration out of the same 2.5 cu ft of resin with the same SFR. In the simplest terms... the K, or hardness removal, capacity of a softener is determined by the volume of resin and the salt dose used to regenerate that volume of resin NOT THE SIZE OF THE TANK. A correctly sized resin tank's function is to allow enough room (freeboard) above the resin for the resin to move during regeneration. You water conditions and water usage dictate the correct size of the softener. The cost of the correctly sized softener is the cost. You can change the other variables and get a smaller softener using the 5600... stop using so much water or move to a place that doesn't have 25g hard water. I've shown you how to correctly size the softener using only 15 lbs/regen so the salt savings alone will cover the increased cost of the correctly sized softener and what those savings don't cover you can amortize over the 10, 15, or 20 years that softener will serve you. Money is tight and very few have any to burn. You're wise to treat your water because not doing it can get more expensive down the road in plumbing and appliance/fixture repair. If you just can't swing the 2510SXT @ $885 delivered then click here and buy a Clack for not that much less. And all this knowledge cost you what? Invoice to follow.