Always pay attention

When we purchased our first home, it came with a number of appliances and systems.  We didn’t have to buy a new refrigerator.  We didn’t have to buy a dishwasher.  The house came with a water softener.  Stuff like that.

One of the more exciting items that came with our house was a Culligan drinking system.  I’ll be the first to admit that my wife and I are water snobs.  We don’t like tap water.  I know, I know.  I can almost quote for you studies about just how darn good tap water is.   We get yearly(?) reports on how good Janesville’s water is in particular.  But we can’t help it.  Fortunately we’re also very cheap.  So we tend to go for the water filters over the water bottles.  The Brita has been a mainstay in our refrigerator for years.

In any case, our house came with the Culligan system.  Now, we didn’t really inquire too deeply about how well the system was working at the time of purchase.  We knew that the previous owner of our home had only been staying in the house a few months out of the year, and thus several of our home systems were only lightly maintained.  So we were cautious about using the system.

Oddly enough only a few weeks had passed when we got a little flyer from the local Culligan dealer telling us that our filters were due for a change as well as offering a few coupons for service.  A phone call later had us set up for service, and I discovered that two of the filters in the system were good for two whole years, and the third could last between 5 and 7 years.  That’s pretty compelling for a frugal pair who still likes the clean taste of filtered water.

So we got the service done, and honestly, we’ve loved it.  It’s nice.  It’s convenient.   It tastes great.  We built a whole morning routine around a little extra tap sitting on our sink.

Well, we’ve been in the house long enough that the time came to replace the two year filters.   I called in, and discovered that the Culligan dealer would be happy to sell me the two filters and tell me how to install them myself, saving me a trip charge.  Again, reference the frugal nature.   I jumped at the chance.

The instructions were rather straight forward, though they seemed a little daunting at the time.  Within a relatively short period of time and a minimum amount of sweat, I got the two outer filters swapped out.

After turning the system back on, I discovered something odd…the system seemed to be delivering less water with less pressure.   The Culligan service department was more than happy to help me diagnose the problem over the phone (again, saving the cheapskate a service call).   I checked all the valves, disconnected and cleared all the hoses, and ended up replacing the central membrane (the 5 – 7 year filter component) as it was just about 6 months away from needing service itself.

Still the pressure and flow problems remained.   The service department told me to check the pressure on the reservoir tank.   There’s an air bladder inside that needs to be at 7 PSI in order to maximize the amount of water the system could store at any give moment as well as the water pressure with which it delivers it to the faucet.  It was possible that during my fuddling and duddling with the system that I depressurized the tank.

It’s a simple enough problem to fix, if that ended up being the problem.  There’s a small valve on the front of the tank.  Simply attach a bicycle pump, take a reading, and then go to town.

And that’s what I did.  I pulled out the bicycle pump, and sure enough I read it as low.  So I got to work.   I put in a bit of elbow grease, and managed to get the tank near to the correct reading.  Or so I thought.

Soon after restarting the system, I found that things had gotten even worse.   I’d gone from a severely reduced water capacity to Nothing…just a few drips of water trickling out of the faucet.  To make matters worse, my wife is extremely pregnant and consuming water at a terrific rate.   I was running out of chances to fix the system.

One more call to the service department uncovered a whole slew of really technical reasons that my system could be failing.  Reasons involving small clogged tubes accessible only by removing multiple panels.  I gave up, and told the technician to come on out.

On arrival, he ran down to the basement and hooked up his little pressure reader to take a quick reading.

*POP*

“Well, your problem is that your tank is over pressured.  If I had to guess I’d say that your tank is at 60 PSI.  But my little meter doesn’t really go up that high.”

So I don’t know if you’ve ever really looked at the pressure gauge on a bicycle pump.  I know I really hadn’t. Turns out there are two sets of numbers on the gauge on my particular model.

One reads PSI.  The other…reads some other number.  Bars, I think.   By reading the wrong set of numbers, I kind of…over shot.  By a factor of ten.

Yeah…always pay attention.  The water system seems to be working fine now.

D’oh.