Transcription
[Music] Today we're looking at the programming on the Fleck 5600 SXT control valve, probably the most popular residential control valve in water softening in Canada and the United States. And the programming is pretty straightforward. Just going to take you through the various steps here now.
So we're going to enter the master programming menu. In order to do that, the clock has to be set to 12:01 p.m. If you hold the down or the up arrow, the clock will start to move. It'll accelerate here in a second. Once we get to 12:01, oh, overshot it a little bit. Once we get to 12:01, we're going to use this button right here, which is going to act as our enter button. So we're going to press enter, and you'll see it'll toggle between the gallons remaining and the time. You can see now it says 12:01 p.m. And while it's saying 12:01 p.m., we're going to press and hold the up and the down arrow at the same time. It's important that they're pressed simultaneously. We're going to hold that until we enter the programming menu. You can tell when you're in the programming menu because you get a small pencil icon on the LCD screen and you get a code in the upper left-hand corner that references the various stages of programming.
So in this first stage, we're going to pick the units that we're going to be using. So we have the choice of gallons, liters, cubic feet. Gallons makes the most sense, so we'll go to gallons and we'll press enter. The next stage is VT. This valve can be used in a number of different configurations. In this case, we're going to be using S1B, which is standard single backwash. In some of the newer Fleck valves, this value is no longer present and it's been replaced with DF1B, so Donald Frank 1B. So we either want the S1B or the DF1B setting, and we'll press enter.
The next menu item is CT, which is the regeneration method. FD stands for meter delayed. What this means is the valve will regenerate at a preset time, but only when capacity has been reached. It's the most popular method of regenerating a water softener. FI is meter immediate. That means as soon as the capacity of the softener is reached, it will immediately regenerate. Not all that practical in residential applications, just because you often don't want your softener to regenerate, let's say, in the middle of the day when you're doing laundry, you're having a shower. And then we've also got time clock setting, which regenerates the softener based on the number of days that has elapsed, not the amount of water that's been used. We very, very strongly recommend meter delayed FD, which is how we're going to program this softener today.
Number of tanks. This is a single tank softener, so we're going to press one and or enter on one. Capacity. The capacity of the system depends on the size of the softener. Today, we're going to assume we're working with a 1 cubic foot softener, and we're also going to assume that we're trying to set this up in the most salt-efficient settings possible. So we're going to set this to 20,000 grains capacity.
H is water hardness. Very, very important that we program the proper water hardness into our softener. If you fudge this number, if you just sort of take a wild guess at it, you'll either not get full efficiency from your softener, it'll regenerate too often, or it won't regenerate often enough and you'll end up with hard water periodically before the softener regenerates. So it's very, very important that we get an accurate number here. So again, using the up and down arrows, we'll set the hardness value to whatever we want. We'll say 10 G or 10 grains per gallon. Some municipalities report their water hardness in milligrams per liter. You can convert to grains per gallon, which is the unit that we want to use here, by dividing milligrams per liter by 17.1. So 10 grains per gallon is the value we'll input. We'll press enter.
SF stands for safety factor, and RS stands for reserve capacity or reserve setting. We highly recommend the SF technique of programming the softener, so we'll press enter on SF. The safety factor we're going to choose is a percentage, and we very strongly recommend you go with a 10% safety factor. So we'll move that down to 10 and we'll press enter.
Day override. If a softener doesn't regenerate often enough, the resin can become damaged over time. So we recommend that if this is on a rural setting, if you're on well water, that you set your day override to seven, meaning that the softener will regenerate either when it reaches full capacity or when seven days has elapsed, whichever comes first. If you're on municipal water, we can bump this up to 14 days. The day override is especially important if there's a high amount of iron in the water. So even if you're on city water and you know there's a high amount of iron, I would still recommend setting this down to a day override of seven, and we'll press enter.
RT is regeneration time. Most people like their softeners to regenerate in the middle of the night when they're not using any water and it won't interrupt their activities. So you can use the up and down arrows again and choose whatever time you like. We'll choose 2:30 a.m. and press enter.
Backwash. So when this does regenerate, the backwash is measured in minutes. So right now we have a 10-minute backwash, which is what we recommend, so we'll press enter.
The brine draw cycle. This is when the brine solution is being pulled from the brine tank. 60 minutes is standard, and there's no reason to not go with 60 minutes, so we'll press enter on that.
Rapid rinse. Once the brine solution has been pulled through the resin bed, there may be some residual salt there that you want to get out. So there's a rapid rinse stage where it rinses that resin. We usually like to see that at 10 minutes, we'll press enter.
And brine fill. The brine fill cycle is what dictates how much water gets added to the brine tank, which ultimately translates to how much salt gets used the next time the regeneration occurs. And depending on whether we're going for high salt efficiency or not, and the size of the softener, this brine fill number will be different. And for now, we'll just leave it at six minutes and press enter.
The next stage is the FM programming stage. This is the type of turbine that is used. The turbine is the device in the back of the valve that measures the amount of water which is being consumed. It's a pretty important component. The Fleck 5600 SXT uses the T, yep, that's a T, believe it or not, the T0.7 turbine. So we'll press enter on that, and programming is complete.
So the last step is to reset the clock to the current time. So I'll move this to our current time here. It's 1:30 in the afternoon, and we'll press enter. And now at this point, you'll get the clock at 1:30 p.m., and it will toggle to gallons remaining before the next regeneration, 1,800. And that concludes programming the Fleck 5600 SXT valve.