Water Softener goes AWOL

Lesson to be learned – protect your overflow pipes

We’ve had a few weeks in France and were worried to hear from our UK house sitters that our TapWorks water softener’s sump had filled with water and was leaking salty water from the kitchen cabinet onto the floor.

My immediate instructions were to isolate the softener using the bypass valves and turn the supply off.

On arrival home I drained the sump and tried a regeneration routine. This revealed water leaking from the pressure vessel. This clearly was the source of the excess water in the sump. What was not obvious was why the sump had filled when there was an overflow pipe to an external drain.

The overflow pipe would have been far more effective without the nest of insect life that had chosen the pipe as their new home.

Moral to the story is to make sure all external overflow pipes have a gauze mesh protecting them from new residents.

That aside the pressure vessel was acting like a mini volcano slowly weeping out the balls of the softener medium. Given it was installed in 2008 it has given a good run for its money.

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