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Soft Water for high pressure rinse?

S

slash007

Well-known member
I am going to re-plumb my weep and noticed that soft water runs to the pumps for the high pressure rinse and also to the weep system. I am going to change all the weep to run off of city water, and was wondering if the high pressure rinse would be fine running on hard water or if there was any advantage to using soft water there?
 
It depends on how hard your water is, but it could cause problems with your equipment.

It will rinse the same, but if you have customers who don't spot-free or dry after washing and don't mind the minor spotting, they might be upset when you change the rinse to hard water. Those spots don't come off easily.
 
Our water is pretty hard here, it was a hardness of 20 the last time I checked. I guess keeping it soft is probably better. Any idea what size water tank I would need in order to weep hot water to 5 bays at around 16oz a minute? Thanks.
 
I'd go soft for everything. Easier on the fittings and such. Also to what MEP said, if a customer doesn't use spot free, they won't be happy with the results of hard water drying.

As for tank size, I cannot answer. Why wouldn't you use a boiler with a 100+ gal water storage tank?
 
Jeff_L said:
I'd go soft for everything. Easier on the fittings and such. Also to what MEP said, if a customer doesn't use spot free, they won't be happy with the results of hard water drying.

As for tank size, I cannot answer. Why wouldn't you use a boiler with a 100+ gal water storage tank?
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I do have a boiler, but it has never worked. From what I was told by the previous owner, it was going to cost over 3k to repair it so he never did. I figured it would be cheaper to just put in a hot water tank. Plus the boiler is plumbed to a lot of other functions, so if I got it working I would be sending hot water to other areas and I don't really want to waste the gas on that.

I understand about using soft water for the pumps and will do that, but is there any reason to weep soft water? Wouldn't that just be a waste?
 
It really depends on how soft your city water is. In our area you could easily use city water. Most washes use city water in the final rinse or high pressure rinse with no problem. You need to check the hardness of your city water to make an intelligent decision.
 
You would probably be okay weeping hard water as long as it's not plumbed through the pump, but if you're going to heat hot water I think you'd be better off using soft. Hard water will scale up a heater, and 20 grains is pretty hard.
 
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