Should I Manually Regenerate My Water Softener If The Salt Runs Out?

 I became a first time homeowner this year. It was exciting and fun, but also came with some home upkeep chores that I was not used to. One of those chores was to maintain the salt level in the water softener brine tank.

I was told by the seller when we moved into the house that we should never let the salt run out, and that we should check it occasionally. If we ever see that the salt is getting low, we should add a bag or two to get the level back up.

Well, I completely forgot about that and it did run out of salt. Our water started to taste minerally and we were getting white water spots on our shower door and our cups. I figured that had to do with the water softener, so I went in the basement and looked, and, yup, it was out of salt.

I immediately ran to the hardware store to buy 3 bags of water softener salt. I got them home and poured them into the brine tank. Then I started searching Google for articles about what to do if the salt runs out in your water softener.

There are loads of articles on the topic, but they mostly talk about what happens if you do let the salt run out. They explain the stuff about water spots, a funny taste to the water, soap not working as well, and build up of minerals on plumbing fixtures. Then they mostly said to just avoid the situation all together.

I didn't really find an article that said what you should do once you add salt to an empty water softener brine tank.

I am not a plumber and not a relevant expert in any way, so do your own research about what to do in this situation, but I just wanted to share what I did.

My water softener automatically regenerates either every 14 days or whenever the house has used around 1000 gallons of water, whichever comes sooner. Looking at the digital readout of the water softener, it seemed like it wasn't going to automatically regenerate for at least a week.

I didn't think it was good to let it go that long. I figured that the last time (or possibly several times) that it automatically regenerated, because there was no salt, it didn't actually regenerate. So I wanted to force it to generate immediately.

I broke open the instruction manual that came with the water softener and found that I could schedule the system to regenerate at 2:00 AM that night, the time when it normally automatically regenerates. It does it late at night because that is a time you are unlikely to be using any water.

I pressed one button on the system and scheduled a manual regeneration of the system.

It worked out fine for me. It was pretty uneventful. It regenerated while I was asleep, and when I woke up the water was soft again.

I was worried about causing a problem or causing damage by manually regenerating, but it didn't seem to result in any problems.

Based on this single experience, and not in any way an expert-level understanding, my recommendation would be to manually regenerate your water softener after you fill it with salt after having it run completely out of salt. Maybe only if it seems like it's been out of salt for a while. If it ran out of salt like a day or two ago, it might be fine to just wait. But it doesn't seem like it could hurt anything. Seems like at worst it would be a waste of salt.

But like all of the other articles I read said, just check the brine tank regularly and don't let it run out of salt. That will let you completely avoid the situation I went through. Best of luck to you with your water softener situation!




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