RE: Water softeners

[Simon Haslam <simon_haslam@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ah yes, that's on my list for when the round tuit arrives! For the
dual chamber metered softeners (like Kenetico/Crown/Harveys) it's a real
pain if you notice the water has gone hard again (we normally see it on
tea) since you need to regenerate both chambers (i.e. do one, wait
overnight for the water in the machine to get salty, do another).

I was wondering if you could use a probe to measure the conductivity of the
water (i.e. saltiness) inside the bottom of the softener? Then maybe below
a certain threshold it could trigger a signal on a 1-wire sensor. That
said, maybe optical is closer to what others will have done already, e.g.
reading gas meters.


Simon

--- On Wed, 18/5/11, Paul Gale wrote:

From: Paul Gale <groups2@xxxxxxx>
Subject: RE: [ukha_d] Water softeners
To: "ukha_d@xxxxxxx" <ukha_d@xxxxxxx>
Date: Wednesday, 18 May, 2011, 11:04

Adding an HA relevance to this topic - I've found it a pain to remember to
add new salt blocks every few weeks. You can tell when it's run out as the
water feels so different in the shower etc. I was thinking of adding a salt
level sensor and feeding that into my HA system (probably directly into
HomeVision). Was thinking of an optical sensor across the salt block area.
Anyone done this with one of these types of softener?


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