Water Softener Settings: What to Set Hardness, Reserve and Regeneration Time To

What Your Water Softener Settings Should Be

Most home softeners need only three or four numbers, and you can work all of them out from a water test and a rough idea of how much water your house uses. Set the hardness to your tested hardness in grains per gallon, plus extra if your water has iron. Set the regeneration time to an hour when nobody runs water, usually around 2 a.m. Then, depending on the type of control you have, set either the number of days between regenerations (a timer softener) or a reserve that covers about one day of water use (a metered softener).

Get those right and the softener does the rest. Get the hardness too low and hard water slips through before the resin is recharged. Set it far too high and the softener regenerates more often than it needs to, sending extra salt and water down the drain.

Step 1: Get Your Hardness Number in Grains per Gallon

Everything else depends on this number, so it's worth getting a real one. Water test reports give hardness either in grains per gallon (gpg) or in milligrams per liter (mg/L, the same as parts per million). Softener controls expect grains per gallon. To convert, divide mg/L by 17. North Dakota State University Extension's guide to water softening puts it plainly: "One gpg is equal to 17 ppm or 17 mg/l." So a report that says 255 mg/L means about 15 gpg.

If you're on city water, your utility can usually tell you its hardness, a point the Minnesota Department of Health makes in its home water softening FAQ. On a private well, you'll need to test, and it's worth testing for iron at the same time. A home test kit gives you a quick number, and a lab test gives you one you can lean on. Crystal Quest® offers tests for both city and well water in our water test collection.

For a sense of scale, Penn State Extension's water softening guide classifies hardness this way:

Add Iron to the Number

A softener's resin grabs dissolved iron the same way it grabs calcium and magnesium, so iron uses up capacity too. That's why the hardness you enter should be higher than your test's hardness result when your water has iron. Crystal Quest's water softener regeneration calculator counts each 1 mg/L of iron as 5 gpg of extra demand. Water with 15 gpg of hardness and 1 mg/L of iron gets a setting of 20.

There's a limit to how much iron a softener should take on. Penn State Extension's article on iron and manganese in private water systems says softeners are generally only recommended for iron when the water's pH is above 6.7, hardness is between 3 and 20 gpg and dissolved iron is under 5 mg/L. It also warns that iron that has already oxidized, the orange or rusty kind, fouls softener resin. If your iron is higher than that or already rusty when it comes out of the tap, raising the hardness setting isn't the fix. A dedicated iron filter ahead of the softener is. Our guide to removing iron from well water covers those options.

Step 2: Find Out Which Kind of Control You Have

The control head on top of the resin tank decides when the softener regenerates, and it does that in one of two ways:

• A timer control regenerates every set number of days, whether you used a lot of water or almost none.
• A metered control counts the gallons that pass through and regenerates when the softener's capacity is nearly used up. It saves salt and water in weeks when the house is quiet.

The Crystal Quest Whole House Water Softener uses our Vtrol control head (a Fleck 5600 SXT). The base system comes with timed regeneration, and metered regeneration is an upgrade, so check your order or the settings menu to see which one you have. On this control, the hardness and reserve screens only appear when the control is set up as metered. If your settings menu shows a day count but no hardness screen, you have a timer.

Two Crystal Quest systems are different. The Salt-Free Water Conditioner has nothing to set at all: it doesn't use electricity, doesn't regenerate and doesn't have a timer. And if you have a SMART whole house filter, the SMART media itself has no grain rating. Grain settings only apply to the softener tank on a SMART With Softener system, which is rated at 45,000 grains.

Step 3: Set a Timer Softener's Days Between Regenerations

A timer softener doesn't know your hardness, so you do the math once and give it a number of days. You need three figures:

• Grain capacity. This is on your spec sheet or product page. The Crystal Quest Whole House Water Softener is rated at 45,000 grains for the 1.5 cubic foot size and 60,000 grains for the 2.0 cubic foot size.
• Your hardness setting from Step 1, including any iron.
• Gallons used per day. Your water bill gives the real figure. If you don't have it handy, the U.S. EPA's WaterSense program estimates that each American uses an average of 82 gallons of water a day at home. That average includes outdoor watering, so if your outdoor taps skip the softener, your softened use may be lower.

Multiply hardness by daily gallons to get the grains you use each day, then divide the grain capacity by that. Here's a worked example for a family of four with 15 gpg hardness and 1 mg/L of iron on a 45,000-grain softener:

Always round down, never up. If you round up, the resin runs out before the regeneration day comes around, and you'll get hard water for the last stretch. The same family on the 60,000-grain size works out to about 9.1 days, so every 9 days. If your resin is getting old, it holds less than its rated capacity. Our regeneration calculator lets you account for resin age. Switch it to advanced mode and enter your softener's actual rated grains (45,000 or 60,000 on the Crystal Quest softener) rather than picking a tank size from the list, since the list's presets assume different capacities. Enter your own gallons per person too, then round its answer down the same way.

On the Vtrol control, this setting is called Day Override and shows as DO on the display. The steps to change it are further down.

Step 4: Set a Metered Softener's Hardness and Reserve

A metered control does the capacity math for you. It takes the grain capacity programmed at setup, divides it by the hardness you enter, and subtracts a reserve. What's left is the number of gallons it'll treat before it regenerates. With the example above, 45,000 grains divided by 20 gpg gives 2,250 gallons. That's the reason an accurate hardness number matters so much on a metered softener: it directly sets how many gallons you get between regenerations.

How Big the Reserve Should Be

A metered control set to delayed regeneration doesn't regenerate the moment capacity runs out. It waits for the regeneration time, usually overnight, so it needs a reserve of soft water to get through the rest of that day. (A meter-immediate control regenerates right away and, per the manual, generally doesn't use a reserve.) The Vtrol 5600 SXT service manual says the reserve should be set so the system keeps delivering treated water between the time capacity is used up and the actual regeneration time.

In practice, that means about one day of your household's water use. For the family of four above, a reserve of around 330 gallons would leave roughly 1,920 gallons of soft water between regenerations. The Vtrol control won't let the reserve go above half of the calculated capacity, but even that cap is far too much for most homes: a reserve of half the capacity would make the softener regenerate about twice as often as it needs to. Stick close to one day of use.

The control offers the reserve two ways. A fixed reserve (shown as RC) is a set number of gallons that stays the same when you change the hardness. A safety factor (shown as SF) is a percentage of capacity, from 0 to 50 percent, so it moves whenever the hardness or capacity changes. If you know your daily water use, the fixed reserve is easier to reason about.

The Day Override on a Metered Softener

A metered Vtrol control also has a day override. If that many days go by without enough water use to trigger a regeneration, it regenerates anyway. Setting it to OFF turns that off. Some owners keep it on as a backstop for long stretches of light use, so the resin still gets a regular recharge.

Step 5: Pick the Regeneration Time

The regeneration time is the hour the control starts a scheduled recharge. Choose an hour when nobody is showering, running the dishwasher or doing laundry. That's why so many softeners are set for around 2 a.m. During a regeneration the softener is busy rinsing and recharging, and it sends water to the drain, so it's not the moment to draw a bath.

Early risers and night-shift households should move it to whatever their quiet hour actually is. On a private well, if you also have a backwashing iron filter or carbon tank, give each one its own time so they don't regenerate together. Two tanks pulling water at once can ask more of the well pump than it can supply.

How to Change the Settings on a Crystal Quest Vtrol Control Head

The Vtrol control head on Crystal Quest softeners is programmed with three buttons the manual calls Up, Down and Extra Cycle (the quick-start page in the same manual calls Extra Cycle the Re-Gen button). The steps below come from its service manual. If your control looks different, follow the manual that came with it.

Set the Time of Day

1. Hold Up or Down

   Press and hold either button until the display shows TD.

2. Adjust the time

   Use Up and Down to set the current time.

3. Press Extra Cycle

   The control goes back to normal operation. It also returns on its own after 5 seconds without a button press.

Change Hardness, Reserve, Regeneration Time and Day Override

These live in what the manual calls User Programming Mode. With the softener in service and the clock set to any time other than 12:01 PM, press and hold Up and Down together for five seconds. The control then walks you through the settings one at a time: Day Override (DO), Regeneration Time (RT), Hardness (H), the reserve (RC or SF) and the current day (CD). Use Up and Down to change a value and Extra Cycle to move to the next one. Pressing Extra Cycle after the last setting ends the session. Some screens won't appear, depending on how your control is configured, which is how a timer setup hides the hardness screen.

Don't wander off mid-change. If no button is pressed for sixty seconds, the control discards your changes and leaves programming mode.

What to Check After a Power Outage

The good news first: the Vtrol control stores your programming in permanent memory, so a power outage won't erase your hardness, reserve or schedule. Its built-in backup also keeps track of the time and day for at least 48 hours. While the power is off, it stops counting water use, but it remembers the gallons it had left. If a scheduled regeneration was missed, it queues one and runs it at the next regeneration time.

After an outage, the time of day flashes. Press any button to stop the flashing, then check that the time is right. If the power was out longer than the backup lasts, set the clock again. A softener with the wrong time still regenerates, just at the wrong hour, which might land in the middle of your morning shower.

When to Change Your Settings

Settings that were right on installation day don't stay right forever. Go back through Steps 1 to 4 when something changes:

If the settings check out and the water still isn't soft, the problem is usually mechanical rather than a number on the display. Our water softener troubleshooting guide walks through salt bridges, drain problems and worn resin. If you're setting up a brand-new softener, Step 6 of our water softener installation guide shows where programming fits in the startup.