"George E. Cawthon" wrote



Gary Slusser wrote:

"Daniel Prince" wrote

They fail due to failure of the glass lining. It fails due to the
manufacture of the tank but more likely, the handling of the tank before
or
during installation. Bumps, hit, drops etc. effect the lining and then
the
water is against the steel. If the glass was intact all over the steel,
the
tank wouldn't fail from the inside out. Problem is, all lining will fail
at
some point if there is hard water in the tank and heat is applied under
the
resulting scale. Steam is created under and in the 'sediment' (hard
water
scale) and steam is very powerful. The resulting explosion causes a
break in
the lining and time is now the enemy to bare steel under water. Water of
very varying quality as far as it being acidic or otherwise aggressive
to
bare steel. And of course the outside of oil and gas fired water heaters
(the tank) is also bare steel with flame added every so often for
various
periods of time.

Anyway, here's a copy of a (false) statement I saw on one of the URLs in
a
post on down in the thread:
"Water softeners can help reduce sediment, but anodes can corrode in as
little as six months if the water is over-softened."

Question: How do you over soften water? Water softening is the removal
of
hardness from a water. All the water tests I've ever used states water
as
soft if not hard to some 'degree'; usually stated as grains per gallon
or
mg/l or ppm, of hardness. I know of and use a tincture soap water test
that
shows if the water is soft or hard but... maybe these water heater
manufacturers and web site guys know something about water hardness that
I
don't? But I don't think so. Water is either soft or hard, and the
amount of
hardness is measurable but the softness, it is not measurable.

Gary
Quality Water Associates
www.qualitywaterassociates.com
Gary Slusser's Help Forum www.qualitywaterassociates/phpBB2/

Ain't life grand when everybody uses different terms, but I
think this is a trick question. Of course you can't make
water too soft, because soft in absolute terms means an
absence of minerals, i.e., pure water. But water quality
and water softner people (you?) talk about hardness which is
the concentration of certain minerals and they consider
softness the absence of just those specific minerals. I'll
bet that what they meant wasn't "too soft" but too
conductive by adding replacement ions. Now whether water
softners really increase the concentration of ions to
significantly the increases the corrosion of the anode, I
don't know.

I'm glad you agree, and there was no trick question. Speaking of different
terms..... my industry isn't allowed to use the word "pure" unless we speak
to microbiological content. And soft relates only to hardness content.
Sorry, that's the way it is from residential to commercial to industrial
water treatment. But take another stab at defining what was actually said;
over-softened.

Ion exchange softening increases the TDS (total dissolved solids) of the
water very little. And it's not corrosion of the anode rod that causes the
glass lined steel tank to rust through.

Gary
Quality Water Associates
www.qualitywaterassociates.com
Gary Slusser's Help Forum www.qualitywaterassociates/phpBB2/