Thought I would share a failure of my water softener that turned out to be a major PITA today.

Last night we started having some intermittent water supply issues which I thought was just problems from our well that our neighborhood is on. Ultimately we went to bed only wake up the next morning with essentially no water/ or extremely low flow to everything in the house.

I start troubleshooting and after about 20 minutes I realize we still had water supply up at the front of our property by the water main, as well as some spigots, and in our upstairs garage apartment. At this point I was dumbfounded.

Any ways I finally start disconnecting one of the sink supply lines and filter media from my water softener comes pouring out!


I have now spent almost the entire day flushing every sink hot/cold, tankless water heaters , showers, toilets , etc. Some areas were worse than other which require full removal of supply lines and valves to flush the media, others it was as simple as cleaning the screen from a faucet.

I had no idea this was a potential failure mode with these water softeners. My unit was a 10yr old Aqua Pure.

Yep. Sorry you had to deal with that. My in laws had the exact same thing happen. It's a thing. But it's not the end of the world. Glad you got it figured out.

Found one line feeding our toilet that is completely blocked up, zero flow even with just a pipe stub sticking out of the wall (valve removed). I am going to try and snake out this line (1/2" copper) with some weed eater line…hop this doesn't end up in having to run a new supply line to this toilet. Thankfully everything else is flowing fine now, this toilet got hit the hardest.

This is the second time I've heard of this in the past 2 months. I too had no idea that this was a thing. The previous instance was on a fairly new install and the water softener mfr sent out a crew/guy to clear all of the lines for my friend immediately.

I'm not sure if some brands are more prone to failure than other or how you guard against this. Any thoughts?

Biggest think I have learned is make sure to buy a quality, serviceable unit. Clack and Fleck seem to be the brands to go with. I am also thinking about putting a stainless mesh strainer on the outlet of the water softener, minimal pressure drop and would protect against media going into downstream piping.

Clack and Fleck are just valves, but if you have a good valve, it should keep from distributing the media.

Clack WS-1 is the one I see most often recommended.

I'm in the middle of shopping for a small system to feed a new tankless gas water heater.