Water treatment called Scaltrol????

I saw this write up about a company that has a filter/chemical injection system to replace the need for a water softener in your home water supply.

Here is a statement from their web site:
"Very simply, Scaltrol stops mineral scale by introducing a measured amount of sequestrant into the water. The mineral molecules, which have a positive charge, are attracted to and held in suspension by the negative charge of the sequestrant. The mineral molecules are unable to join together, so scale is unable to form.

The chemical is a "food grade polyphosphate"

It would be great if it really works. I hate the salt issue with conventional water softeners. Plus my wife and I both have diets that call for low salt so getting rid of the extra in the water would be good too.
Scaltrol web site

Does that system inject Hydrogen Peroxide? Seems I read about that somewhere.

I have limited understanding about water softeners, bu the salt is not supposed to actually make it into the house water system is it? Isn't the salt used to flush out the resin tank?

I think in most cases there is a small amount of salt carryover, sometimes it is noticeable to guests that are not used to the water. We have a separate faucet for straight well water.

Are you on a well? Do you have good water? Im on a well, there was a culligan water softner in the basement, I bypassed it, my water is fine straight from the 180 foot well, I'll be dammed if I'm gonna put any chemicals in it, or soften the water.

Read the MSDS. They are injecting Polyphosphate Salt into the water.
Poke Here

The salt water is to wash/clean the ion beads in the treatment tank. They then filter/catch the hard water minerals. The better softeners have a fresh water rinse after the salt water but they all still leave some salt in the system.

I have had several systems over the years and some use more salt than others. The Kinetico Water Softener system I had seemed to work the best. It actually metered your water usage and since it had two tanks it only regenerated when needed. The others just are timed and regenerate each night. So if you use more water than normal you may not get much softening at the end. If you use less than you may have a high residue of salt.

The only issue with Kinetico Company is that they give out territories. So you can only get them from the one guy for your area. I had a run in when my system started to dump HUGE amounts of salt into the fresh water system. The dealer was less than helpful. So I threw the system out in the yard and told him to come and get it. They had a deal where you could rent it for one year and then if you liked the system you could buy it at a predetermined price. The system worked well until the controller messed up. The dealers service/attitude was terrible. I am glad I had not boughten the system. I will no longer deal with companies that lock me into a certain territory dealer.

Jay I have a my own well. Actually two wells. The house is shallower at 180 feet but a slow vane. The barns are on a larger vane and they had to go to 480 feet to get good water and flow. The water is good but it is very hard. If you do not have a softener system a water heater will not last a year. The water faucets will stop up with the calcium/iron in a few years too. I have a separate faucet at the sink for drinking water that is directly from the well. I have to take it apart and soak it in vinegar every few months or it will start to leak.

The old original water system here did not have any softener. The pipes where half full of deposits. I even treat the outside water for the cattle and shop. Before I did I had waterer problems all of the time. The valves would have deposits mess them up, even the plastic ones.

Yes that can be a problem, I have hard water, or at least there's alot of iron in it, so far the hot water has lasted me 12 years, but we do get staines on clothes and some of the sinks, ect, from the iron!

Thats pretty funny right there. Here in MN we can't have phosphates in our detergents anymore due to state laws, but someone can sell us this system that injects phosphates to make our water pure? Ha Ha, what a racket.

I need a business where I can inject used oil into the ground and recover pure oil out of the well. Then I will charge everyone mountains of money to take their used oil off their hands, thanks to the EPA law, then charge everyone else extra since its renewable... I need to work out the details and call a congressman or two... :wink:

I have very hard water. I also have sulfur and iron bacteria. My well is 200ft 15 gpm. Water is 15 ft from the top. I have a water system that softens the water and treats the sulfur and iron bacteria with a chlorine injection pump into a chlorine contact tank, then a filter to remove some of the chlorine taste and smell. The treated water does have a small amount of salt in it.

Hard water and iron are two separate things. Our water is relatively soft (4 grains hardness), but has a lot of iron- constantly streaking bath tub, shower, etc. Still considering an iron filter.

There is a lot of iron in our well water too. I have a whole house filter to catch the big chunks and need to change the filter element every month or so or the flow becomes restricted. Then the filtered water goes through a Sears conventional water softener, which uses a couple of hundred pounds of salt a year. All of the water used in the house goes through this process, except for the cold water in the kitchen sink, which is not softened.

Without the softener, I would have to clean the toilets every other day, or they would quickly get very brown from the iron. All our clothes would get rusty as would our dishes. With the softener working right, we don"t have any trouble using the water for colored clothes, and only have to add a small amount of Oxy-clean for white clothes. The dishwasher works fine and stays clean inside using good quality dishwasher detergent that we buy in Montana. We cannot buy decent dishwasher detergent in Washington any more. GRRR!

I have to be careful that the sprinklers do not wet the house, since the untreated outside water WILL leave rust stains fairly quickly.

The aquifer that we get our water from is through basalt, which apparently has lots of iron in it. When I first drilled the well, the water tasted great and did not seem to have either a rust or hardness problem. Unfortunately over the years, the water got harder and much rustier, possibly because of the water contacting oxygen in the air in the well casing. We have not drunk our well water for about 20 years, but buy bottled water, since it tastes a lot better.

One thing that helps deal with the rusty water is to inject about 5 pounds of dissolved citric acid right into the well and let it sit for a day or two. This causes a chemical reaction in the water, which turns the rust in the water black and makes it lots more soluble. After a day or two of letting the citric acid work, I run an outside hose for several hours to get rid of the black color, which initially looks like india ink, and then the water is fairly iron free for a while. It also makes the black water smell of sulfur. After I have treated the well with citric acid, I also add a gallon or two of liquid bleach, to try to sterilize the well.

I would recommend a water softener to reduce the amount of iron in your water. With softened water, you also will be able to use less detergent and soap to get things cleaner than you ever could with the hard, rusty water. Oxy-clean and Iron-out chemicals, available at most farm stores also really help deal with the rust in the water.

Good luck, rusty, hard water is a hassle, but most of the time the problems can be dealt with fairly easily and not too expensively. At least with our situation, treating the water is really worth the trouble and expense.

I bought a bunch of those Scaletrols, to install for customers years ago. only they were named something different. They look exactly the same, in fact I still have one in the basement. The idea of softening with phosphates is legit. It is a very cost effective way to do it. I sell Commercial dish detergent by the truckload and we put a lot of phosphate in a lot of the products to soften the water so that the customer can get stuff clean. It is however being outlawed in more and more states, so we are having to put chelates in instead. The zeolite systems that use salt are the best from what I see. I used to sell and lease and service a lot of them. Almost always you just set how many gallons of water it will treat and when it gets to 95 % or something like that it will regenerate early the next morning. They all rinse most of the salt out. after regenerating. if someone can taste salt it needs more rinse time simple as that. The problem with the Scaletrol type units is they get plugged up with mineral scale, so that they don't draw the phosphate into the water. You have to open them up and clean them about every other week.

We tried something like that by a different name. All we had was bad tasting water & mineral scale in the cooking pots that heated it. Also I canned some food & the outside of the jars were all white when dry. We went back to a regular system.

To get salt out of drinking water use reverse osmosis system. They have small systems that go under the sink.

Sixteen states are beginning a dishwasher detergent phosphate ban, according to a report in the Associated Press. Starting Thursday, stores will no longer be allowed to sell dishwasher detergent with more than 0.5 percent phosphorous. However, the law does not apply to commercial dishwashing products.

States instituting the rule include Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin.

In some areas, the ban has already been in place for years. Spokane and Watcom counties in Washington have had a ban in place since 2008, while Oregon passed a law last year that reduced the allowable phosphate levels in automatic dishwasher detergent from 8.7 percent to 0.5 percent.
http://www.environmentalleader.com/2010/06/29/sixteen-states-ban-high-phosphate-soap/

We have one. It is slow and the water tastes terrible out of them.

The replacement cartridge for the cheapest cartridge runs 210 bucks. I can buy a lot of salt for the same money.

I have as bad of water as anyone: calcium, iron and arsenic for starters. A conventional demand water softener plus reverse osmosis does the job well enough; no need to invest in expensive snake oil.

This is WATER TREATMENT 101. Hard water has calcium and magnesium ions in it. To get them out you have to use a water softener which has a mineral bed in it. The beads in the mineral bed have sodium ions. As the water flows through it there is an ion exchange. The calcium and magnesium ions from the water stick to the beads and the sodium ions are released into the water. Sodium ions are not salt as we know it but that's another chemistry lesson. Depending on how much water was used and how hard the water is the softener must be recharged with salt to replace the sodium ions so it can do its ion exchange again. During this regeneration the salt is washed down the drain. There are no ill effects caused by drinking softened water but it doesn't taste very good and if the water was very hard the softened water will be laxative. A good system has to be sized according to the hardness of the water in grains per gallon and how much water you use. If the water is salty you need to rinse longer while regenerating.
Iron in water is dissolved iron and needs to be removed by oxidizing it. This can be done by injecting chlorine with a chemical feeder and then filtering out the oxidized iron (rust which makes everything brown)with a sand filter.

(quoted from post at 22:29:57 12/31/12) This is WATER TREATMENT 101. Hard water has calcium and magnesium ions in it. To get them out you have to use a water softener which has a mineral bed in it. The beads in the mineral bed have sodium ions. As the water flows through it there is an ion exchange. The calcium and magnesium ions from the water stick to the beads and the sodium ions are released into the water. Sodium ions are not salt as we know it but that's another chemistry lesson. Depending on how much water was used and how hard the water is the softener must be recharged with salt to replace the sodium ions so it can do its ion exchange again. During this regeneration the salt is washed down the drain. There are no ill effects caused by drinking softened water but it doesn't taste very good and if the water was very hard the softened water will be laxative. A good system has to be sized according to the hardness of the water in grains per gallon and how much water you use. If the water is salty you need to rinse longer while regenerating.
Iron in water is dissolved iron and needs to be removed by oxidizing it. This can be done by injecting chlorine with a chemical feeder and then filtering out the oxidized iron (rust which makes everything brown)with a sand filter.

Click to expand...

Sorry Bud, we already know that.... What was your point?

(quoted from post at 22:29:57 12/31/12) This is WATER TREATMENT 101. Hard water has calcium and magnesium ions in it. To get them out you have to use a water softener which has a mineral bed in it. The beads in the mineral bed have sodium ions. As the water flows through it there is an ion exchange. The calcium and magnesium ions from the water stick to the beads and the sodium ions are released into the water. Sodium ions are not salt as we know it but that's another chemistry lesson. Depending on how much water was used and how hard the water is the softener must be recharged with salt to replace the sodium ions so it can do its ion exchange again. During this regeneration the salt is washed down the drain. There are no ill effects caused by drinking softened water but it doesn't taste very good and if the water was very hard the softened water will be laxative. A good system has to be sized according to the hardness of the water in grains per gallon and how much water you use. If the water is salty you need to rinse longer while regenerating.
Iron in water is dissolved iron and needs to be removed by oxidizing it. This can be done by injecting chlorine with a chemical feeder and then filtering out the oxidized iron (rust which makes everything brown)with a sand filter.

Click to expand...

In the water treatment process the proper way to remove iron from water is through an airator. Blown air over water will lower the iron count. Lime and sodium aluminate will disolve it to a desireable amount.

(quoted from post at 22:45:13 12/31/12)

(quoted from post at 22:29:57 12/31/12) This is WATER TREATMENT 101. Hard water has calcium and magnesium ions in it. To get them out you have to use a water softener which has a mineral bed in it. The beads in the mineral bed have sodium ions. As the water flows through it there is an ion exchange. The calcium and magnesium ions from the water stick to the beads and the sodium ions are released into the water. Sodium ions are not salt as we know it but that's another chemistry lesson. Depending on how much water was used and how hard the water is the softener must be recharged with salt to replace the sodium ions so it can do its ion exchange again. During this regeneration the salt is washed down the drain. There are no ill effects caused by drinking softened water but it doesn't taste very good and if the water was very hard the softened water will be laxative. A good system has to be sized according to the hardness of the water in grains per gallon and how much water you use. If the water is salty you need to rinse longer while regenerating.
Iron in water is dissolved iron and needs to be removed by oxidizing it. This can be done by injecting chlorine with a chemical feeder and then filtering out the oxidized iron (rust which makes everything brown)with a sand filter.

Click to expand...

In the water treatment process the proper way to remove iron from water is through an airator. Blown air over water will lower the iron count. Lime and sodium aluminate will disolve it to a desireable amount.

Click to expand...

Dalet, It's Less for more, LOL. He took all of the above information that was already posted "more" and gave us back his version "less"

I will add that if one is adding on a system for iron removal as opposed to just using the special iron removing salt, that the iron system should go before the conventional softener to protect it from getting plugged with iron.