Re: Water Softner yearly servicing-Racket???
Hi all, I bought a water softener this time last year. I just received a call from the company to say my annual service was due and it would cost €130......Is this racket. They did not mention this at the time. The whole idea with me purchasing was to put protect all the appliances and showers due to the hardness of the water in my area. I had weighed it up as worth it based on the capital cost and accounting for annual costs of the salt being about €100. However another €130/annum has got me thinking otherwise. Is it necessary ?
Annual servicing for a typical water softener on mains water is a complete nonsense, only suggested by loony tune bandits happy to take customers for a ride and annual salt costs also should only be around 20 to 40 euros for the up to date metered softeners, again if correctly sized and calibrated.
It is true that many larger water softeners will run on for up to 20 years without any servicing and possibly last for 40 years, but at the other extreme, if they were incorrectly sized and improperly calibrated you could have trouble from day one.
So the wrong way to go is buy mini cabinet water softeners intended for one or two people apartments and hope the will run for decades on a larger house.
Small softeners should sell for around 500 euros but many firms end up asking twice the price, then because they are under sized and probably the cheaper timer models, they end up being set to wash every day or couple of days and eat through a mountain of salt and several times more water than larger softeners set on long regeneration cycles.
The smaller mini softener then ends up wearing itself out before long, with resin changes required in a quarter or third of the time larger systems require servicing (5 or 7 years instead of 10 to 20 years).
The valve controls will also wear out quicker the more backwashing they are set for, and if a cheaper hard water brining valve it means the brine tank where the salt is filled ends up dirty with sediment build up, rather than modern valves that fill the tank with treated or softened water keeping them clean.
So you end up paying 500 to 1000 euros for a dirt cheap quality mini timer softener with hard water brining, you then get ripped off by a company asking to service it every year for mad money (130 euro?) when 50 euros would be pushing it anymore than every five years.
Add to it all the salt is running at 100 euros a year when it should be on average 30 euros if the system was metered, and then the mini softener packs up after 7 or 10 years providing a short lived life with high running costs for salt, water and servicing. Complete madness.
Add the costs up over 10 years and you could be paying between 3k to 4k in all the costs required for cheap mini softener from expensive water treatment firms.
What you should get is a top of the range, large capacity, metered, soft water brining, U.S. made softener with 10 years minimum warranty plus extension option, and be paying not much more than 800 to 1200, and then 30 a year for salt, low water use, and absolutely no servicing for at least 10 years, maybe even 20.
Add the costs of a proper water softener over 10 years and it should be 1500 to 2k tops.
Cheap Chinese (Maruyama) and Autotrol timer mini cabinet softeners are the worst on the market when used on yer average size house, they end up costing the earth.