On Sat, 9 Oct 2004 23:40:52 +0100, "John Aston"
wrote:


Ed Sirett wrote in message
news
snip

The problem is that a water softener is a _huge_ restriction on the flow
and
with any form of direct HW systems it will be the bottle neck.

snip

Is this your personal experience?

The Kinetico 2020c High Flow Softener has a service flow rate of 33 lpm and
a peak flow rate of 51 lpm. Providing that I use a suitably large pipe
diameter, is this really going to appreciably slow down my 30 lpm supply?


There are some things that you can do to mitigate this:

- Look for the highest flow model that makes sense. This does not
necessarily mean picking one that is suitable for a larger number of
people in the house - that is more of an issue with single chamber
machines which regenerate at night, and those for more people simply
have a larger resin chamber to be able to deliver a greater volume of
water over a day.
You can get commercial models with higher flow, but they get rapidly
expensive.. If you look at specs. you can ask the suppliers for
their flow/pressure graphs (for the system, not just the valve) and
pick from these. Some machines have 1" rather than 3/4" fittings
which can help.

- You can get wide bore hoses. Often, the ones normally supplied
have as little as 12mm bore, so it's useful to get larger ones. I
replaced mine on a Kinetico a while ago and it did help somewhat.

- The stop valves supplied with the machines are sometimes not full
bore. You can use 22mm or as discussed before, 28mm quarter turn
lever ball valves.

- You have to have a double check valve with a water softener, and
these do tend to restrict flow. You can fit a larger one than that
implied by the pipe - e.g. a 28mm one on a 22mm pipe.


..andy

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