Is it recommended to use soft water for high pressure rinse on a touchless? We are doing an install and setting it up this way and think the only downfall is using a lot more salt but overall a better wash, whats everyones thoughts on this?
Soft Water for entire wash?
- Thread starter wash12
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carwashireland
Active member
In short no. Just your low pressure functions. Hard water actually helps cleaning in the high pressure side of the wash.
MEP001
Well-known member
Not exactly true, but hard water does rinse better by breaking surface tension and knocking down the foam easier.
If I washed 2 cars 1 with soft one with hard water, my hard level is at 8 so its fairly soft already do you really think I would even notice a difference in wash quality, the way I look at it is I won't have hard water spots on the car in places I couldn't dry or the spot free didn't fully rinse.
carwashireland
Active member
A water softener will do little to prevent water spots, so should not be considered as a solution to be used to improve the finish, in the wash where water is left on the car. Softening all water is a waste of money in my opinion. You only need to soften the soap water and have an r.o to give a spot free rinse. This will give you the finish that you need! A water softened rinse will still leave spots! A reverse osmosis rinse will not.
DiamondWash
Well-known member
When we installed our new W.W Razor we had it plumbed all for soft water, I have "hard" well water instead of city water so given what it did to our old touchfree pump and piping overtime I choose to have it plumbed all soft but I also left the option if needed to plumb back to hard in an emergency. My salt usage is slightly up but not nearly what I was told.
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Jeff_L
Well-known member
Soft is preferred for washing with chemicals of course, so should you use it for the entire wash? That is up to you really, but for me I use soft at all my washes for everything. It is simply better on your pipes, connections, etc as you will have less buildup over the years. Will there be build up? Yes, of course, but it will be less than if you used hard water. If you are 8 grains of hardness now, that's pretty low so the economics play out if you have tuned your water softener correctly. If you had extremely hard water, that would be a lot more expense in salt as you would be regenerating more often.
My water softener regenerates after a set number of gallons goes through it so no matter what hardness it is it will regenerate the same amount, should I be doing this differently being I am only at 8 hardness?
Jeff_L
Well-known member
That's the same way I do it as well, my water isn't very hard either. Does your manual have a section which explains how to set your control unit? There should be some type of table that explains if your hardness is X then you should regenerate after every X amount of gallons. The lesser the inbound hardness, the more gallons you can let through your system before regeneration.
MEP001
Well-known member
To expand on what Jeff_L said, let's do a little math. Going by best salt efficiency, you can get 20,000 grains of softening per cubic foot of resin with 6 lbs of salt. So 20,000 divided by 8 is 2,500 gallons you can soften per each cubic foot. So if you know the capacity of your tank(s) you know how many gallons you can soften per regeneration.
