When I moved into my house a long time ago there was an old Sears water softener in the laundry room that seemed to perform its job adequately. Sometime a few years ago it stopped working so I just turned it off and forgot about it. In the intervening years I’ve noticed a marked buildup in calcium deposits on various parts of our plumbing infrastructure and decided that it was time once again to get a water softener going. So I went out and purchased an inexpensive Whirlpool and attempted to install it myself.

Since all of the hookups were there, the actually installation should have been quite simple. However, the new water heater was about 1.5 inches shorter than my old one. I ran back to the hardware store to get a stone paver that would life it up enough, but in the end it lifted it too far. So for the time being I stacked up some greenboard underneath it to bring it up to the point that I was able to hook it up. At some point in the future I’ll get a plumber in to move the hookups lower, but for now this got me up and running. The entire process of installation was mostly painless once everything was at the right height. It was the task of removing the old water heater where things got interesting.

The old water heater had been sitting for quite a while, and was filled about 2/3 of it’s capacity with salt. That salt had now become a solid rock hard mass that weighed down the unit to the point that there was no way I would be able to get it up the stairs. I put out a call on Facebook and a buddy suggested a hammer and chisel and a shop vac. Tried that out and sure enough it worked like a charm, but it was slow. After I filled the shop vac tank once I decided, hey, it’s just salt I can just dissolve it in the laundry tub and wash it down the drain.

As you can imagine that worked out tremendously well. So well that I had to take apart the laundry tub p-trap to remove the sludge that I had caused. However, it did end up giving me an idea on getting the salt out quicker. I filled the water softener tank up with water and let it eat away at the salt for about ten minutes. Then I shop vac’d up the sludge in no time flat. Granted I had to put the sludge into buckets and haul them upstairs individually, but within 40 minutes I had the tank emptied enough that my step-son and I could haul it upstairs.

Overall, the entire process was a tremendous mess and I’m very sore and tired from it all. I’m not looking forward to my four mile run in the morning, that’s for sure. But now we have soft water again, and I’m hopeful that it results in a lot less buildup in my plumbing.