On Aug 10, 1:18 pm, wrote:
Hi. My wife & I just bought a house a couple months ago, in which the
previous owner had installed a water softener. I assume its working
correctly -- as the dishes don't have spots and at first the water
felt a bit "slimy." But, then we figured that's just because we were
used to hard water all these years. Now, we like feel of the water.

The gentleman before us lived by himself. He had the setting as
follows:

Hardness: 25. (Available range is 1-150, default is 20)

Regen day: 14 (Available is range is 1-28 days)
The manual says this is the MAXIMUM number of days between
regenerations. So, I assume it could do it sooner than every 14 days,
if it detected it was necessary? Is this correct? He had it at 14
days for himself, so maybe I should move it to 7 days since there are
two of us?

Depends on how much water you use. If the water always seems soft,
then no need to adjust. If it seems sometimes you run out of
softening and the water gets hard, then you may need to regenerate
more often. The hardness level setting probably determines how much
salt it uses for each regeneration.

Regen time: 2am ... although I could have sworn I saw it doing the
regen one time in the afternoon. So, I guess this goes back to my
previous question ... will it regen automatically if it feels its
necessary to do BEFORE the setting you have programmed in?

Again the answer is depends, some units will detect that, but many
cheaper/older units go strictly by the timer.
Regens in the afternoon - The timer may be screwed up due to a past
power outage or some such -- take a look and see if you can tell what
time it thinks it is right now. You might just need to set it to the
right time.

I have left the setting as he had them and everything "seems" ok, but
I'm wondering if maybe I should adjust something for our situation?
Also, I noticed the other day that the salt tank was finally getting
low (to where I could see water on the bottom), So, I just dumped in a
bag of salt that he had left behind for the tank. Was this ok to do or
should I have done it during regeneration?

Nope, you did just what you are supposed to do.

Finally, is there any additional maintenance I should be doing with
this thing? The manual (which stinks) mentions something about
sanitizing with bleach and allow the system to complete the
regeneration cycle. What about cleaning the salt tank itself?

There may be some sort of maintenance that you should do, but I gotta
tell ya, the ten years I lived with a softener, I did zero maintenance
and nothing bad happened. And the unit was already several years old
when I started.

Sorry for all the questions, but the manual that came with this is
horrible and this is my first experience with a water softener. Thank
you!

-Jim

The only other thing to think about is what kind of salt do you need.
Probably just keep using whatever was there (did you keep the bag?).
In my area, the water had iron in it as well as hardness minerals, and
I had to use the salt with iron-out additive. Otherwise the clothes
would get stained in the washing machine -- not good. Depends on the
water in your area.