HOW TO FIT A WATER SOFTENER – Plumbing Tips

This video will tell you all you need to know about how to fit or install a water softener. Where to install one. What services you need (like cold water mains and 240 volt plugs) and the provision of an un-softened drinking outlet (usually the kitchen tap)

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Holla and welcome to today’s plumberparts.co.uk video. I’m sure you’re looking forward to this amazing time that we’re about to have talking about water softeners. What we’re gonna show you today is how to remove an old water softener. We’ll point some tips towards you if you’re actually fitting a new one in a place where there hasn’t been one fitted before and then we’ll also give you a brief outline on how they work and what you need to do to keep them maintained and sexy. It’s been a pretty brutal Christmas, I gotta say but I have lost some weight which is cool. Anyway, here we go and so I hope you enjoy today’s video. If you’ve got any questions or anything like that, let us know and if you want to know the theory about how water softeners work, just click on the link at the end of this video. If you want to buy a water softener click on the link below. You guys know the drill. Anyway, let’s go. Hold tight!
The best thing we can do to understand this instal a little bit better is to actually trace it out. We’ve currently got the cold water turned off. The cold water main valve, the isolation valve, is this lever valve here. Hard water comes in through this pipe into our beautiful metre that I know we all wanna bypass but we can’t because it’s illegal. The next bit comes out of the metre. Now that ‘T’ runs off there. That goes off to an outside tap because we don’t wanna be softening water that goes outside. Softened water doesn’t taste very nice. People don’t really like it. Apparently, per glass of softened water, you’ve got the same amount of sodium as a pint of milk or a slice of bread but don’t hold me to that, I dunno.
Anyway, our cold water is coming up here. This is unsoftened. This is hard water here. It ‘T’s’ off that way, up to the kitchen tap. It’s important that you ‘T’ off up to the kitchen tap before you go into your water softener manifold because people don’t like drinking softened water like I’ve just said and you don’t wanna soften it. The first place it goes is you go off to the kitchen tap because that’s where most of the drinking water is gonna come out.
Anyway, next bit… So there is our pipe that goes off to our kitchen tap unsoftened. Water will come up here and either go off to that tap or off round here. We follow this bit down. This part here, you can see this whole lot just there, is really, really important.
Firstly, what we want in normal operation, when the water softener is installed and everything is finished, is that valve shut and these two valves open. So cold water will come down this part here into this pipe here. This is unsoftened water. It will go through into the back of my water softener, get softened and then come back on the outlet, under that valve there and then off to your system. All softened water that is, going down there. The reason we have this valve here, is if anything goes wrong with this water softener, we can turn that valve off, turn that valve off and then turn this valve on and then we can play around with the water softener, get that going but also then the customer doesn’t have any disruption to their water supply. Most of the time when you go to a house to fit a water softener, all you’re probably gonna have is that cold water stop-clock at the bottom, you’re main stop-clock, then your water metre and then it will just go up to your taps and off everywhere else.
So what I’m saying is, when you come to a house that hasn’t had a water softener previously installed, you’re probably gonna have to fit that whole manifold and also give a dedicated cold water supply up to that kitchen tap. So that’s the first thing you have to do really before you think about installing a water softener. If a customer ever asks me, “Do you think I should have a water softener?”