Home Improvement Today?

i too use Potassium in my standard older water softener instead of salt.

Depends on settings and how often it regens. Mine takes awhile as its just us two. I got lucky and my softener came with the house, except it was in bypass mode forever so i had to do a hell of a cleaning and sanitizing but it works great now.

I do not use it for the pets water bowl however.

 

Question for everyone:

I am being given a small 16-17' aluminum bass boat that I need to find a place to park.

I was thinking of just putting down some 24"X24" pavers from Lowe's and calling it good, but everything I read online says I need to dig up the area and put a sand base and everything like that and I think they are referring to using smaller pavers ( which I agree with that if it is smaller pavers).

The place I want to park it is already pretty well compacted (compacted enough that my truck ( which is lighter than the boat) creates very little, if any ruts; even when soaked from rain) and is mostly flat already.

Given these details, do you think it is really necessary to have to dig the ground up and everything, or do you think that because of the larger sized pavers, that they wont seep into the compacted ground enough to cause an issue? Being that it isn't perfectly flat, do you think that I may still need sand as a base?

What could be the implications if I did just throw down these pavers?

 

Since it's just a boat and not much weight at all I wouldn't bother with digging or the sand. The Sand is just to help cushion the pavers with a heavier load on top of them I would recommend a weedmat below the pavers just to keep grass from growing between the spaces

 

Thanks, Corel Draw. The cartridge should take minutes. The carbon tank has unions so it should be a minute to unscrew. It has to be rinsed and soak for 24 hrs so it can be bypassed. That is every 5 years though.

lobbying by the Avacado and Orange industry downstream of our water treatment. They want them to spend multi-millions and make it all reverse osmosis.

Both salt and potassium are banned. They are monitoring the waste water to see who still has them hooked up and are fining homeowners.

 

Got it. Figured potassium would be ok but apparently not.

 

Amazing that they have the time/personnel/money to monitor waste water and then narrow it down to an individual household. One more reason I'm glad we punched out...

 

how

 

or more

had a client's basement that was "flooding" , happened a few times over a couple years but didn't seem to relate to rainfall etc , couldn't really understand what was going on . These people are not usually here in winter and I finally figured out that the flooding happened about a week to 10 days after they were back at the house and using water again . Water softener drain line had a leak in it and was dumping it's purge water in the basement instead of outside to the drain

 

Yep
Had a mini mansion flood due to softener drain overflow.
Ran located and found plumbers stubout had a glue cap still on. Guess that’s what ya get for buying a house off courthouse steps

 

Sort of like binary isolation of finding the breaker you need to turn off when they are not labelled or are labelled incorrectly or by an semi-literate ape.
1. Turn off half the breakers at once. If your target doesn't turn off, you've eliminated 50% of the breakers.
2. Rinse and repeat.

Source detection by elimination. You take wq samples at the key sewer line collection nodes to deduce what areas of the network show salts and in what concentration. For example, start at the pipeline collection node farthest upstream. Sample. If test is negative, you've eliminated all the user connections upstream of that node. Proceed downstream to next node and repeat. When you get a positive, you've deduced it two whatever connects to the line between those two nodes (say two streets). Proceed up street 1 to suitable sample locations...then street 2.

This simple small system diagram should clarify the concept.






Then scale it up, same concept.

 

Ugh... I’m already tired and annoyed at the thought of having to do something like that. I’m just gonna tell them it was Kevin, he gets the fine today.

 

Exactly my point. We're going broke but we're going to put all our resources into finding the one SOB with a water softener....BRILLIANT!

 

Broke? All resources? Well you've inspired me to dig deeper int the matter, because it has not been a focus in the regions I've lived or the technical work I've supported.

They are testing for a ton of constituents at the treatment plant anyway, and they are out conducting all sorts of routine preventative an planned maintenance, rehabilitation, and replacement of assets anyway.

But @Kolunatic nailed it with how much water they waste, up to 150 ga /wk. But it is also the water quality issues the salts cause to groundwater and the ability to treat and reuse the wastewater. Both of those factors a far more challenging and expensive than a bit of monitoring or compliance enforcement here and there.

Essentially, these devices waste drinking quality water (expensive enough, so that already wastes ratepayer's fees), and creating even more polluted water on the downstream side, making it difficult or impossible to reuse for other certain purposes (like ag) and further compromising groundwater quality and the need to treat it further in areas that rely upon it. That's a nightmare in the Inland Empire, where they have to inject fresh water into the aquifers just to make what down there usable for supply.

Sounds like the investment in 2 existing O&M crew guys in a pickup for a few days and an existing chemist in the lab with a test tube are providing an epically huge return on investment for the long term.

I realize what I've put below is from a business selling a product, but it is in far more plain language that gets to the point much better than the actual regulatory language in the code.

Content: The Reasons Why California Led the Movement to Ban Salt Water Softeners

The most common type of traditional water softener treats hard water through a process called ion exchange. The water softener runs the water through resin beads where the calcium and magnesium molecules switch places with sodium molecules, leaving the water soft. In more basic terms, the softener removes the hardness minerals – calcium and magnesium – from the water and replaces them with sodium. The salt brine water (sodium and chloride) is then discharged down the drain, wasting up to 150 gallons a week.

blog-M7-19

Sodium and Chloride are not Eco-Friendly

The discharge of salt brines from the regeneration of water softeners can have a negative impact on the quality of water in groundwater basins, recycled water, and wastewaters. Higher sodium and chloride content increases the treatment costs and reduces the potential reuse of wastewater for farming and industrial applications. It can also impede the ability of a wastewater treatment agency to comply with discharge standards related to total dissolved solids (TDS). TDS is a measure of the total concentration of dissolved minerals in water, with chloride being just one of them. The problem is that most wastewater treatment facilities do not remove measurable mineral concentrations from the waste stream, so they are passed on to the environment.

http://www.envirowaterproducts.com/salt-free-softeners/salt-based-softeners-banned/

 

It's also known that the default time for water softeners to flush the system is 2am. Most users don't change that so it is an opportune time for them to check.

 

Nice work! What style is the counter tops?

 

Where I live the 2019 water report Hardness 450mg/L Total dissolved solids 950mg/L Sodium 160mg/L



Our water harder than stone.

So basically the sodium level coming in is higher than they (growers) think should be going out.

EDIT: changed to mg/L but still the same.

 

I hate to tell you guys this but, you are using salt. You just aren't using Sodium Chloride, you are using Potassium Chloride (also a salt). Your water softeners are replacing the calcium and other impurities from the hard water with Potassium instead of Sodium. Still using just as much water, Still regenerating just as often, still dumping just as much chlorine into the sewer system, but you may have lower blood pressure. lol.

 

But wait! There's more! None of this would have been possible if LADWP hadn't raped the people and land of the Owen's River Valley beginning in 1913 and causing one of the biggest ongoing environmental disasters in the history of the US, casting airborne carcinogens across the west.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owens_Lake
Los Angeles and its suburbs would not exist in its current state without that event. Now, of course, its straw reaches into nearly Oregon and all the way to Colorado for life support.

But I digress.

Wood today! It's all ball bearings!

 

You didn’t really read everything did you? The conversation started with alternatives to salt (sodium salt). Not what was better health wise, environmental wise, or amount of water use wise. Once it was discussed both are banned in CA, that part of the conversation ended. No one argued if potassium was chemically a salt. Either way, it’s moot for where I live as both are perfectly legal and at times even encouraged.

 

I was responding to the guys saying:

"i too use Potassium in my standard older water softener instead of salt."

But no, I didn't read the whole post. lol

Your statement: "No one argued if potassium was chemically a salt". Did you read the entire post?