No water to the wash, only air

[slash007]

Yesterday I started receiving complaints of no water in the wash. I went down and all I was getting was super strong air coming out, mixed in with the tiniest bit of water. I have had issues with no water in the past, but the meter to the wash was turned off and you just didn't get any water. I haven't seen a situation where I get tons of air pressure through all my lines. It's so bad that the toilet tank was bubbling from the air being forced through it. Anyone ever seen this happen and know if it can be anything at the wash? My theory is a broken line before my main meter as my meter itself is on and not showing any issues. For now I just shut down the wash and am waiting on the city to investigate, but want to be sure it's not anything that is in the ER that could be causing this.

 

[Waxman]

Check the first thing in the water line into the wash. In my case there is a hose bib just 'in' from the meter. If air comes out there, it's a water feed problem from the city.

 

[slash007]

So to make a long story short, it was not a city issue. I'm about 95% sure it was all caused by a bad solenoid on my Profile. I've spent hours shutting things off to help isolate the issue and after finding that defective relay and shutting the air off to it, so far it's been an hour and I still have water. Problem is that almost every single item was stopped up with dirt or air locked, so I'm having to go line by line and function by function cleaning lines out. Can't believe that a bad air solenoid could cause so many issues, but it was set to 100PSI, so I guess it somehow overwhelmed the water when no one was using it and caused a chain effect. Can't think of any other way it happened.

 

[slash007]

Just got everything that I can think of back up and running again. Most things were filled with sand and I had tons of trouble clearing them out. Should I assume that is all resin and I need to add more to to my softener tanks?

 

[HeyVern]

Sounds to me like there was a broken line somewhere, dirt got in at the break and was forced into your wash. I'd check around the area to see if there has been work done on the main.

 

[MEP001]

You said the meter was turned off, I would agree that the dirt is probably from the city side working on a line break or something. Softener resin looks nothing like dirt.

 

[Dan kamsickas]

Dirt would have only come from outside the building. I would assume either the line from the main to your building has a break or the main had a break. I would be concerned you're not out of the woods.

 

[slash007]

Sorry, it wasn't dirt, it definitely looked like resin. Wrong choice of words in the original post. It was brown and grainy and took me forever to get it out of my hair from all the times it shot out as I cleaned lines. I'm sure I'll keep finding issues with blockages for a while. I still don't know how air could have overpowered water, so I'm thinking they shut the water off even for a little and that's when the issue started. Hard to know for sure though.

 

[MEP001]

Water is typically 60-70 PSI. I keep my main air regulator at 90 because that's the maximum of the Flojets.

 

[Dan kamsickas]

I would bet they were doing some work somewhere and you got a pocket of air through. I've seen it happen. Best case scenario is you had some resin forced out by pressure differential and you just need to refill the softener tank. Sometimes you can put light behind the tank and see the level inside. Typically around 12ish inches. Worst case would be you destroyed the distributor tube and/or the heads and now you have a bigger rebuild.