As the hardest working appliance in your home, your water improvement system requires periodic cleaning, maintenance and disinfection to ensure the best water quality and to maximize efficiency.
Your water softener is the hardest working appliance in your home, on guard every single day to protect you and your family
Every drop of water that you use in your home has an effect on your life. The clothes we wear, our appliances, our laundry, and even the food we eat is affected by the water in our home. The average water softener in our area cleans hundreds of thousands of gallons of water every single year, processing countless pounds of contaminants.
All water softeners should be properly maintained, cleaned and disinfected on a regular schedule
Like any other hard working appliance, water softeners do get dirty, and suffer from wear and tear during their service life. Water softeners should be cleaned and disinfected annually, or at least after every 100,000 gallons of water processed. A proper cleaning, disinfection, and maintenance schedule will keep a water softener working well to protect you. Disinfection schedules depend largely on your raw water quality and your water usage habits.
Water can contain invisible contaminants like bacteria, sediment, chlorine, pesticides, herbicides, hardness minerals, and radioactive particles
Even safe city water is teeming with a multitude of invisible contaminants, like bacteria, sediment, chlorine, pesticides, herbicides, hardness minerals, and radioactive particles. These contaminants are highly diluted in city water but can concentrate and accumulate inside water softeners and other water treatment devices. When contaminants accumulate in a softener, they can seriously impair its ability to function properly, degrade water quality, and even result in premature mechanical wear or failure.
It is now common knowledge that bacteria thrive in all city water supplies, even ones that use chlorine/chloramine
Chlorine is probably one of the single largest breakthroughs in water treatment. Chlorine protects us from many dangerous organisms that can live in water. Some organisms have evolved tough defenses like mucous layers to protect them from disinfectants like chlorine. These disinfectant-resistant bacteria and other organisms live and travel in many city water supplies looking for a home where they can multiply.
Water softeners can become a home for bacteria to grow and unwanted contaminants to accumulate
Some organisms can clump together along with other contaminants to form a slimy biofilm that creates a safe home for rapid bacterial growth and accumulation. When bacteria grows in colonies like this, it can rapidly contaminate anything that it touches and cause significant harm to the softener’s ability to clean the water as well as possibly creating a risk to your health. Salt brine tanks are especially vulnerable to contamination with living organisms.
Modern water softeners include built-in cleaning and disinfection systems to help minimize bacterial growth between maintenance visits
On-board cleaning and disinfection systems like Pur-Gard allow a water softener to continuously protect itself with a maintenance dose of cleaning and disinfection chemicals to help minimize bacterial contamination and dissolve accumulated contaminants. Just like brushing your teeth every day, this advanced technology maintains a good baseline of protection between detailed cleaning visits.
The better you treat your softener, the better it will protect you
Since it plays such an important role in your household, you should be sure to take good care of your softener. Give it a high quality salt, keep your Pur-Gard reservoir full, use a power surge protector, and have your system cleaned and disinfected on a regular schedule.
Benign bacteria can lurk in safe city water supplies and slowly colonize water softeners and other treatment equipment. Heterotrophic plate count (HPC) bacteria are chlorine-resistant bacteria that inhabit most plumbing systems throughout Utah and the rest of the United States. HPCs are evident as part of the slimy coating that can be found on drinking filters and inside water softeners known as a ‘biofilm’.
A biofilm is a collection or organic and inorganic material, as well as living and dead organisms, responsible for numerous water quality and distribution problems such as loss of disinfection residual levels, odors, color, microbial-induced corrosion, reduced material life and a reduction in dissolved oxygen content. While HPCs themselves are usually not harmful to human health, they provide nutrition and protection for pathogenic bacteria. A protocol has been developed to help address this dangerous threat to your comfort, health and safety. Through injection of Pur-Gard on a carefully controlled cleaning schedule, your system is able keep itself as clean as possible between scheduled maintenance visits while working hard for you every day.
In addition to being a safe and effective anti-bacterial, Pur-Gard will also clean, lubricate and protect the metal moving parts in your system, while minimizing scale formation and enhancing the cleaning capacity of your water softener. A specialized disinfectant will be applied during periodic service and maintenance visits by your Intermountain technician as needed, based on your water usage habits and system configuration in compliance with the SP-5000 disinfection protocol.
Periodic Maintenance is truly the most effective way to ensure your system is operating at maximum efficiency and that you proactively protect it from attrition and potentially major repair problems.
Intermountain’s Cleaning, Disinfection, and Maintenance Service includes the following:
- System Cleaner & Disinfectant
- Water Testing
- Control & Timer Calibration
- Software Update on compatible systems
- Pur-Gard System Cleaner
We perform periodic maintenance on all brands to potentially prolong the working lifespan of your system, enhance salt efficiency and provide you with the very best water quality.
