I've had my backwash get stuck a couple of times, which filled my septic system and saturated my drain field, causing a backup in the house.
The water softener is a kinetico, so there's no way to electrically monitor it, it's mechanical only.
One thought is an inline flow meter in the backwash hose, but I don't think it will last long because the water quality is not good. Any ideas?
Can you use a timed valve and have it run X amount of time on a regular schedule?
No, that's not how those work. There's a mechanical valve mechanism that trips after so many gallons of water go through it. The only way to manually trigger it is with a screwdriver and advancing the mechanism. But it needs to be be able to trigger itself when it needs it, because if you trigger to frequently, your water will be too soft.
To complicate things, I also have an iron filter that I need to monitor. It also does regular backwashing, and this is actually the one that got stuck. I took it apart and cleaned it with CLR, but I don't trust it even though it's been working fine since. I'd have it serviced, but Kinetico dealers charge an arm and a leg (it was here when I purchased the house), and I don't want anyone in here that could spread the virus either right now.
Word of warning, don't purchase equipment like kinetico that you can't buy parts for or service yourself. When this dies, it's getting replaced with something that I can get parts for without paying $200 for just a service call. It's good equipment, but so locked down on the parts side of it, it costs a fortune to maintain.
That does make it more difficult. Your only real options as I see it are:
One thought... Are the waste lines for these something that only they use at some point? What if you put an optical sensor or flow meter on that side? Might be easier for cleaning. You may find some other options with salt water aquarium gear as well.
You really ought to look at having the water softener separated from your septic. It is very bad long term to put this volume of water and salt into your septic. Many locations have banned this practice.
Do you have the space to put in a dry well or a separate leach field?
I'm not sure how your backflush plumbing is, however could a simple pressure sensor in the backwash outlet be enough to sense flow or not?
When the system is back flushing, are there any valves that are mechanically moving in some accessible manner? My idea is to attach a small neodymium magnet to a moving part. Then, strategically mount a magnetic contact sensor that can be tripped by the valve/magnet moving/rotating.
It only goes into the septic in the winter. When it's warm, I put it out the side of the house into a drain pipe that runs about 100 feet into the woods. In the winter though, that will freeze where it goes out of the side of the house. Graywater systems are not legal where I live unless you had one already before they banned them.
The Iron filter is also an effective sediment filter, so the backwash from that will jam up any kind of mechanical flow meter pretty quickly.
What about temp? My well water is 52f year round, if the temp in the lines is low, I should be able to use this as an indicator of backwashing.
There is a clear window on the top of the until that has the gear that triggers the different cycles. I would have to track that gear over the course about 90 degrees. But that doesn't help if one of the internal valves is stuck open, which is what happened last time.
I'm thinking Hubduino with temp sensors. There are 3 backwash lines, so I will just tape a temp probe to each line. I have everything I need already since I went a little bonkers on aliexpress a couple of years back with arduinos and sensors.
Sounds like a good plan. I use DS18B20 temperature sensors taped to my HVAC Freon lines to monitor my heat pump. I think the same technique would work for your application as well. I used aluminum foil tape to attach my sensors to the refrigerant lines.
That's a good plan I'll probably wrap them with aluminum tape for heat transfer, and then black tape to give a little insulation from outside air temperature. I have like 20 of those sensors which I bought when I was building stuff with MySensors.
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