Moving water softener - help please...

[jack]

Grab a cup of coffee - even for me this post is stupidly wordy (although there are pics too).

 

We were put on the spot about an installation position for our water softener during the build. That, coupled with a remarkably stupid set of decisions I made about plant room layout, meant it's ended up in a really inconvenient place in our utility room. 

 

We'd like to move it before we install built-in furniture in the utility room in the near future. I've located a potential new position, on a shelf (yet to be built) at about waist height in the plant room. It's good for the incoming main, less good for drainage, and possibly a bit annoying for connecting softened water into the existing pipework.

 

Here's how it is at the moment:

 

 

I haven't shown the existing drain from the softener, but it basically goes through the wall to the SVP.

 

Just near the label "Up to cold water manifold loop" in the diagram above, there's an open waterless trap taking the output from the HWC tundish:

 

 

 

Here're a photo of that general area (which is very congested - I'm tidying up all the wiring and insulating the pipework as part of all this):

 

 

So now for the questions.

 

DRAINAGE

The initial thinking was a trap at the unit, running a drain along the right hand wall on the floorplan above, then hiding it in the wall along the top of the diagram above, before joining it to the drain from the MVHR which is on the other side of the wall north of the HWC.

 

However, reading the installation details for our softener, the 10mm OD flexible drain pipe they supply can go up to three metres from the unit, and more if your pressure is above 2 bar (which ours is). I therefore can't see why we can't just join the flexible drainpipe to some microbore copper and run that on the surface of the wall at a slight fall to the open waterless trap that the tundish uses. It would be thin enough to slip comfortably behind the existing pipework. Anyone see a problem with that approach?

 

There's also an overflow outlet, which they say should ideally go to the outside of the house, but which at the moment just discharges into a separate open trap beside that for the drain. Is there any reason not to just duplicate the microbore setup for the overflow and have that drain to the airless trap too? Might be a bit crowded, but presumably I can just attach a flared bit of pipe to the top of the trap to give some more space for everything to discharge into?

 

WATER TO SOFTENER

This should hopefully be relatively easy, because the softener is going right near where the water comes into the house:

 

 

Presumably we could we just turn the first elbow after the PRV so that it heads upwards, then connect into that (see diagram from softener installation manual below). The pipe going into the wall would be redundant, and the filling loop could be reinstated just above the elbow. Edited: that won't work - still need the unsoftened water for kitchen and exterior taps of course! So slightly more complicated - need to either connect in where the current filling loop is or muck about with another T and moving one or both of the existing elbows downstream of the PRV.

 

Criticisms? Better ideas?

 

WATER FROM SOFTENER

This may be the tricky bit. It seems to make sense to try and connect in the region between the yellow arrows (blue arrow shows existing soft water supply):

 

 

I could take the softened water from the softener, up the wall, then along two edges of the ceiling (adjacent the wall) and down to an elbow into a T within this area. There's room - just - to do this.

 

Again, any criticisms or better ideas? 

 

POSSIBLE PRV CHANGES

At the moment, the PRV is before the water softener, which according to the installation manual isn't right. 

 

We have over 6 bar static pressure, so I'd like to take this opportunity to change the existing PRV for a 5 Bar version, and then put an adjustable TRV (set to 3 bar) and pressure valve after the water softener, as shown in the right hand example here:

 

 

Seems reasonably straightforward to just replicate this going up the wall, yes?

 

OLD PIPEWORK

At the least, it seems I need to cut and cap off the branch from the T at the top righthand corner of the first diagram in this post, and do something similar near the blue arrow above. The plan would be to drain the dead leg between these two points as well as possible and then cap it off inside the wall/ceiling at each end. Anything else I need to consider with this? 

 

Another minor point: because this room isn't finished, I can still in theory remove wall and ceiling boards to access any of the existing pipework. Not sure whether that makes it any easier or opens up options for more creative solutions (eg, could I go up into the ceiling from the softener, turn across and connect into the redundant pipe going along the top of the north wall, then turn back over the ceiling and down to elbow/T in as described above. Quite a lot neater for not too much more work?)

Sorry for the complexity of this question, but the current softener location has bugged us since the day it was installed, and this is our best chance to get it fixed before we finalise the joinery in the utility room and (finally!) finish the plant room.

 

Oh, and my plan is to get a plumber to make the actual connections once I've got a precise plan, but feel free to try and convince me I can do this myself.

 

Many, many thanks as always.

 

 

 

 

[Onoff]

Not got a clue but reading with great interest as I've got the one to install I got from @PeterStarck. The incoming main is a mile away from  the boiler, wm, DW etc. Trying to get my head around it! 

[Gone West]

@jack I have the softener drain pipe and overflow pipe both running into the same waste pipe. The drain pipe might cause some resistance if it remains at 10mm for a long distance but if it opens out to say 15mm I can't see any problem.

 

[Jeremy Harris]

I have our 10mm softener drain pipe running for around 2m at a guess, it flows into an open bit of 32mm vertical waste pipe that is at the side of a cupboard downstairs, mainly so that I can check it's flowing freely.  The overflow pipe is a larger diameter and probably needs a low flow resistance drain, as, unlike the drain pipe, the head is very low, just a few mm or so.  I have mine connected a bit like @PeterStarck above, into a waste pipe (above a trap) but I do have some slight concerns about this.  One of the known failure points on the Harvey-type twin cylinder softeners is the water fill valve letting by, which causes the brine level to rise and flow out the overflow.  It's an easy to fix fault (just clean the fill valve usually, from what I've read) but I'd like to have some visible indication that there is flow from the overflow, rather than the indirect indication of high salt consumption.  I may fit clear pipe to mine as a way of checking easily, without needing to lift the lid and have a look.

 

The only other thing I can think of with mounting the softener higher up, is that you may need a way to bleed air out of it, depending on the pipe runs.  When I was having problems with the ultrasonic flow sensor in the Sunamp PV shutting the unit down, I found it was as a consequence of having a lot of very tiny bubbles of air in the incoming water supply, and some of that was traced to air pockets in the softener.  I re-arranged the pipework on the outlet side so that it was higher than the softener and that seemed to help.

[jack]

23 hours ago, PeterStarck said:

@jack I have the softener drain pipe and overflow pipe both running into the same waste pipe. The drain pipe might cause some resistance if it remains at 10mm for a long distance but if it opens out to say 15mm I can't see any problem.

 

Thanks Peter.

 

The current flexible drain pipe is 10mm OD, I think, but quite thick walled, so probably something like 7mm internal diameter at best. I think that with 10mm pipe and a downward slope the whole way it should be fine. Will check whether there's room for 15mm though.

 

6 hours ago, JSHarris said:

One of the known failure points on the Harvey-type twin cylinder softeners is the water fill valve letting by, which causes the brine level to rise and flow out the overflow.  It's an easy to fix fault (just clean the fill valve usually, from what I've read) but I'd like to have some visible indication that there is flow from the overflow, rather than the indirect indication of high salt consumption.  I may fit clear pipe to mine as a way of checking easily, without needing to lift the lid and have a look.

 

I wasn't aware of that. A portion of the run in clear, or some sort of shallow tray just before the drain that shows evidence of passing water should make that issue visible (helped by the fact it's salty and so will leave some residue).

 

6 hours ago, JSHarris said:

The only other thing I can think of with mounting the softener higher up, is that you may need a way to bleed air out of it, depending on the pipe runs.  When I was having problems with the ultrasonic flow sensor in the Sunamp PV shutting the unit down, I found it was as a consequence of having a lot of very tiny bubbles of air in the incoming water supply, and some of that was traced to air pockets in the softener.  I re-arranged the pipework on the outlet side so that it was higher than the softener and that seemed to help.

 

I'm planning this on the wall above the rising main:

 

 

The water softener will be at the level of the two flexes (to be seen whether I actually use flexes rather than plastic pipework for just that bit. The vertical stuff will be copper).

 

 

 

 

 

[Jeremy Harris]

That should be fine, as air will bleed out through the vertical pipe.  Our problem was that I had a similar arrangement (minus the pressure reducing valves, as we're on a controlled pressure supply) but with the pipe and three ball valves horizontal, and very slightly lower than the softener flexi pipe connections.