Water Softener Discharge Line

Homeowners are advised to take the following precautions to prevent impacts from brine discharge to their drinking water supply and their owts.

Water softener discharge line.

When the water softener resin is backwashed two or three times a week concentrated brine enters the wastewater stream as a slug of 38 to 112 gallons each backwash cycle. The industry standard is a polypropylene drain line that is rigid yet flexible. This is to prevent non potable water from flowing backwards possibly mixing and contaminating potable drinking water. Drain line best practices on water softener service calls in minnesota we find a wide variety of drain line material being used.

Those of us in the backflow industry would immediately identify this as a cross connection that must be protected by an air gap an adequate physical separation between the water softener and the sewer. Hard water is softened through eliminating the magnesium and calcium it contains. Water softener discharge subsurface or surface within 200 feet of drilled bedrock driven or dug public wells or within 400 feet of gravel packed or gravel developed public wells. According to most plumbing codes a water softener drain line must not be connected directly to the household waste system.

One problem is that the septic tank discharges solids into the drainfield which can cause the soil to plug and the drainfield to fail. This causes two problems. They then bored thru the wall to the softener and ran a flexible discharge hose from the softener thru the wall and into the top of the pvc pipe. A softener drain line must not be connected directly to the waste system but must be emptied into a laundry tray floor drain or properly trapped special outlet preserving an air gap of at least two times the diameter of the drain line but in no case less than 1 1 2 above the top of the receptacle used.

Make sure the supply side pipe is connected to the inlet port on the water softener. The house side pipe to the outlet port. Many of the home improvement stores sell big box water softeners and installation kits to get them connected. In one sentence the installer directly connected the water softener drain line to the sewer.

When sears installed ours they water jetted a pvc pipe 10 deep into a narrow strip of soil next to the garage wall.