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Water softener, pump, tank - installation order?
After some thought I set the system up like this. I assembled it last year during my last visit to Thailand. It has some disadvantages but works pretty well and is convenient, cheap and with good water quality. I will probably improve it by connecting it in different order (as described below) but this will work for now. I bought most of the equipment on Lazada and Shopee. The water inlet goes to a T-connection. Connection 1 goes to a cheap plastic 1/2" threaded water meter (with a Thai flag printed on it, nice 🙂 ), same type as you see everywhere in Thailand. This is convenient to have since you can easily keep a log book when you perform maintenance, change filter flush the softener etc. It is a bit redundant if you do not have a valve before the filters for unfiltered water to water plants, etc. This water meter supplies water to the first filter, more to that later. Always have a log book so you can keep track of when to perform maintenance. Connection 2 on the T connector goes to first another T-connection with a faucet for watering plants with unfiltered water. Then a shutoff valve, and at last a T-connector to connect to the line FROM the filter system, last point on the line. This is a bypass valve to make it so that the house have water in case of maintenance or repair. After the water meter comes the first filter, a 20"-inch PP sediment filter of the Big Blue type seen on a lot of places like Lazada and Shopee. I would not bother with running around in local shops to find those parts because often it is "no have", they do not know what you want or it is a hefty overprice compared to the online shops. Just pick a retailer on Lazada or Shopee that have most of the equipment you want and order some extra filters when you are at it. The blue connectors and pipes you get from the local hardware shops. After the PP filter comes a 20" carbon block filter (from my research the Granular Activated Carbon (GAC) filters are much less effective than the carbon block filter so it is of no use to put that filter first. You can have one of that on the end if you want but it is pretty much redundant if your water quality is not extreme or you need very high flow. I will make a suggestion here but it comes later. After the carbon block filter there is a 1" line to the water softener. Here I put two T-connectors in series. One for a flush valve faucet so I can flush the residual carbon from the filter after each change. the other one for a bypass so I can use higher pressure water connected directly from the outlet of the pump, to use for flushing the water softener with higher speed, if there for some reason is necessary. I previously bought a Filtex branded at Home Pro before I knew you could buy it at the online marketplaces. They are sold everywhere and consists of a fibreglass pressure vessel and a salt bucket. You fill the pressure vessel with the PP resin and the salt bucket with salt tablets/crystals and water. The PP resin is very small balls of a plastic that absorbs calcium and magnesium ions (that makes water hard and causes scale), but it likes sodium ions even more, which means you can regenerate this by flushing a salt solution through it. This flushing procedure is controlled by the control valve, on top of the pressure vessel. There are two kinds of control valves, one automatic and one manual. I have the manual one since I am not here most of the year, I do it myself. The automatic one I do not know exactly how it works, if it works by timer or if it has a built in sensor to see when it is necessary to flush the filter. You still need to fill salt in the bucket though. If I bought it today I would maybe go for the automatic one, but I have to do more research on it and so do you. 🙂 Directly after the water softener there is a shutoff valve, just before the inlet of the storage tank. This is probably redundant, but nice to have in some cases (like troubleshooting, maintenance and similar). The more valves the better (maybe)! 🙂 The tank is put on a home welded stand 2.5 meters high, with a massive cast concrete block as base. A good thing to do is to put union connectors to the inlet of the tank so it is possible to take down the tank from the stand and not have to cut pipes. That is a good thing to do for all equipment that may be needed to remove for some reason in the future. There are blue 1" unions at the construction shop that attach to the standard blue pipes with that nice toxic pipe glue/cement. The common advice is to put the tank first, and then filters. I do not really se any benefit in doing that. There are mainly two reasons I put those filters before the tank. One is to have the tank clean and not have to take it down to clean it very often. We were away for 1,5 years since last time and the inside of the tank were in a surprisingly good condition after we came here this round, and there have not been very much usage water usage while we were away. I had expected a slippery goo on the inside walls of the tank, but I was glad ther was none. The other reason is to have a steady flow of water into the inlet of the pump to avoid possible pump cavitation (wear). One reason why the common recommendation to have the tank first may be that on some places the mains pressure is so low that the added pressure drop over the inline filters might be so high that the tank won't fill up completely. The outlet of the tank is connected directly to a 1" union connector as close to the tank body as possible, then to a shutoff valve and then to the inlet of the pump. The water can have a direct path downwards to the inlet of the pump, with as large diameter pipe as possibel fits the threads. Most common I have seen i 1" threaded tank connectors so go with 1" pipes for this. I have some kind of pump of the brand "Carina" bought at Home Pro for around 10.000 baht. It have worked somewhat fine but I would not buy this today, i would rather buy a Mitsubishi branded or a similar type one with a larger air cushion. The one I have have broken as it is not possible to fill air in it any more. There is a Schrader type tyre valve on the side for filling air, and the air acts as a cushion to always have some backing pressure in the line so that the flow doesn't drop after opening a faucet (before the pump pressure sensor tells the pump to start). The Mitsubishi branded pumps seem to be of high quality So I would probably change to that one later. There is a cylindrical yellow variant with a air cushion on top, anda plastic cover available I probably would buy today If I had to change. After the pump there is the T-connector to the above mentioned maintenance bypass valve. Just before the water line to the house is a shut off valve and a reducer down to 1/2" pipe before it goes down into the ground. If I could choose today maybe I would put 1" pipe to the house and from there branch off with 1/2" line. The slight problem with this setup is that if I do not keep track of exactly when to regenerate the water softener, I end up with a tank full of (somewhat) hard water. I notice when the water softener needs to backflush in the shower, when the soap does not work anymore, and I have to use more soap than normal. Then I need to perform the flushing and consume a large amount of water before the water in the tank gets diluted enough for it to be of good quality again. I will probably make a rebuild by switching order of the tank, softener and pump like the following. Inlet > sediment filter > carbon block filter > tank > pump > softener > house. Maybe after the softener I will put an additional granular activated carbon filter. The advantage of this is that I will notice earlier when the softener is saturated and needs to be regenerated. After regeneration there will be good quality water immediatley, unlike now when the tank needs to be consumed/diluted out with soft water. The drawback might be that the flow through the softener is higher than before (when using lots of water in the house), and thus it may be that the capacity of the softener is not sufficient. But with a new build it is possible to take this into account when dimensioning the system, to make the softener have capacity for the pump's maximum flow. A larger softener with a lower flow means more resin and thus more time between regeneration. If interested let me know I can take some pictures for you guys to see. I hope this post clears out some question marks. -
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