 What's up guys? I'm not a plumber. I don't even play a plumber on YouTube, except for today. What we have here today is a water softener, and this is at my house. I'm a cheap ass, and I want to save some money. I'm going to show you guys what I did to rebuild this water softener without having to spend the big money on buying a new one. If you guys want to learn how to do it, and want to see what I did, learn from my mistakes, make sure you check out the video, hit the thumbs up button. I do HVAC primarily, but I've done a lot of plumbing in the past. I just don't like doing it. Let's go ahead and get started. This is a 2003. It's not really McLean water softener. It was the value series. It just says value on the back. This was a McLean head. It's got a metering head here. We've got the stuff to rebuild that. We've got the piston and the little o-rings and stuff in there. We've got the resin and the bed that goes in here, and so we're going to do the whole thing. As you guys know, I hate plumbing, so we're going to just basically document this because I didn't see a whole lot on this particular model, but yet I know this is a very popular water softener. It's an American made one too, I believe. Yeah, made in the USA. That's what we're doing today. I've been running res care in it. I've got obviously a well here. We're going to first unplug it. We're going to go ahead and pop this head off. I've got some compression fittings here. This is what I had available when I started this thing up, which will actually come in handy. We'll be able to bypass and be able to turn it back on so that she least can have regular water. I don't know if I really want hard water in the system, but we're going to do that. We're also going to shock the well too. Water softener like this somewhere around 800 bucks, 900 bucks for a good one. We're rebuilding it grand total for about $260. What does all the work is the resin that's inside there, so you're going to see what that is. It just looks like BBs. We're going to go ahead and pop this thing loose and get her apart. We'll just do it piece by piece as we do it. For those people out there don't know what these are. These are Nipix pliers. They're not just regular old claw hammer type pliers. They literally are a down pressure crescent wrench. I've had people in the past say I was doing something that would make a technician cringe, and this one here I've already got broke loose. There's no o-ring or nothing in there. Getting that nut there undone, it's kind of in the way of this clip here. This is supposed to just pop right off. That just pops straight off. Just pull it right out. It's got a little lever right there, and that just comes right off. So we've got that undone, and this should come undone now. Pretty easy. There we go. See all that is just a C-shape there. Before we get to that clip there, we're going to go ahead and just take out these two screws that are right here, and that's going to allow us to pull this clock mechanism off, and then we'll be able to get to it a little easier. We've got a piston here that's going to get replaced. I'm pretty sure we need to pull that pin out. There we go. Cut the pin out. We're going to put that right in our little cover here. We don't lose anything. Looks like that just kind of comes undone. As soon as we get that piece there undone and the power wire there undone, it should pop right off. We're going to head and unhook this plastic piece here. We're going to probably let all these things soak in CLR or something of the sorts. It really doesn't look that bad from what I'm seeing. You can see that there's some black. Now we can get to that nut there and then pop that piece off there. We've got that piston here, which I've got a new one of those. I'm going to go grab some of the parts so you can see what we've got to work with. We've got our funnel here, which funnels it down through the end of the tank. I don't know if we're going to need the rock resin stuff here. It's a sand bed basically. Here is the piston, which there we go. It's for the 1500, 2500, whatever. There's that. Here is the seals and the spacers. Then there's a few different miscellaneous pieces here. The guy that sold me all this is a water treatment place. This guy rebuilds them himself. Then when I get done, I'm going to shock my well, which is chlorinating the well. I've got that there. Then far as your grease, I guess you want to make sure you use silicone grease, not planters grease. Like I said, right there is that piece. That should pull right out of there. I have never rebuilt one of these. I've only redone the resin, so you're going to have to work with me a bit here. That pulled right out. I ended up taking my linesmins, ended up just kind of pinching here and then pry it against the brass, which obviously did not leave any marks. Then that pulled out. Not horrible shape. It's kind of nasty right there. Some of our other things. We're going to take that apart, but I want to focus on the resin first. This right here should pull right out. There we go. There is the top of it. You can see the water comes in through the oval shape and vice versa on the piece down through the center there. Then that valve thing that you've seen, there's all the guts. That's where all the spacers and things are at. That's going to move back and forth, I believe, to channel it whatever direction it needs to go through. It's going to allow it to come through the out, through the end, because you've got obviously a place where it's siphoning in here. You've got draining going back out through the white tube. So again, a little miss of everything going on here. Yeah, it looks kind of nasty. We got the water sub pump right there. Let's go ahead and just drain it into there. Telling how heavy it is. Once the water's out of it, we may just take it outside and drain the resin out of it. So we just drain that out. I don't want to see if we're starting to lose some resin there. Look at that stuff. Yeah, that looks a little ratty. Let's see where we're out here level-wise. So I'd put it back to the same place. Man, that thing's lucky if it's up to here. I went ahead and did it in this tub here. This crap is like ridiculous. It's like ball bearings. So we're going to be, I spilled a little bit down here. They really don't look horrible from what I can see. I'm just putting all new in there. This thing, like I said, was started to be used in 2003, January. And I think it's just plum gotten old. Yeah, look, see, I think it's just because it's dry versus wet. So I've taken this Venturi-type device here completely apart. You can see the black stuff. There is a old well, oil well, within a half mile of here. And so I would speculate we've got oil in the ground around here. And I obviously am drinking some of it, which probably ain't that good. But like I said, this has been an accumulation because I just don't wipe off very good at all. I mean, it wipes off as you can see. But yeah, I mean, this how long it took for this to accumulate. I mean, this house was finished in December 2002 and moved in January of 2003. So it's 18 years old as of today in November of 2021. This here is like a little rubber ducky. It's got like a little beak here. The water comes through and then keeps the crap from coming back in at the other direction. So I'm just going to wipe all this crap out. There's nothing wrong with it. Nothing's broke. At this point, there ain't a whole lot I can do. There's another tube over here. This other tube here is kind of goes on there. Yeah, I understand that. We're using a little bit of this citrus blast cleaner here. It's gotten it pretty clean. It still doesn't make me feel much better about what's in my actual water. Definitely going to have to have it tested. I've been using bottled water for the last few years, but I drink quite a bit from the faucet. Unfortunately, you know, this is not very comforting when you see stuff like that. Not comforting at all. And city water is not really available where we're at. Cleaned up pretty good. I've gotten it completely scrubbed, took a scrub brush to it with that degreaser. I, looking back, would have known about this. I would have just bought a new one. Did not know that it was going to be like this. You can see some of the nasty crap there. That's just, that's troublesome, to say the least. What I'm doing is just using one of my drill bits to shove it down through the center. I've sprayed the degreaser inside the tube and basically just shoving it on through and getting it clean. There you go. Got some of that nasty stuff off the end there. Okay. Well, everything's clear now. Obviously, I've got a problem with the well. I'm not sure what exactly is available to take care of this. I'm sure there's got to be something. At this point, there ain't nothing more we can do. We just got to get it back together and get it up and running. Get everything back together. The ball free floats around in there like it's supposed to. It, you blow through the end here. Got it all deburred too. It had a little edge there. It was a little sharp. So, you bird that. If you blow through it, it's got, you know, check valve action. If you breathe in on it, it comes right through. Put our stick back down in there. You're going to make sure we get it centered, which you can kind of feel the center down there. I kind of went off of the gray mark here where you can see where the stuff was setting at, which I kind of marked it on the outside right here. So, it should fill up about that area there with what he gave me. The guy that set me up with everything I need does this, you know, pretty much every day multiple times and has been doing it for years and years. So, let's go ahead and get this part here covered up. So, we can put a balloon condom, whatever you want over top of that, piece of tape, whatever, and then start pouring stuff down in there. So, what it is, I used my little hook tool here to dig out the spacers that are in between there. They've got rubber seals and then a spacer, a rubber seal, and what happens is that piston I showed you earlier goes back and forth and channels the water, whether it be through that one there, that one there, whether it's going through here or wherever. I'm no softener expert, but I just know that they wanted those changed, so I had to dig them out, which we've got it all down here. And then I got the seal or the o-ring that goes in the circular spot there with that, I call it a turbulent, I forget exactly what it's called, but the thing that we just worked on a minute ago, it goes right in there and I got a new o-ring over there. So, I'm going to count these up, make sure I've got the same amount of parts for going back in there. Just looked up online the 2500 head and now I know the correct order for the spacers. I was a little confused, so it's going to be the nylon, then a rubber, then the plastic, then a rubber, and so on and so on until your very end. We had a total of six rubber rings and then we had five of the spacers, which I destroyed a couple of them, getting them out. I guess there's a tool that will remove them and there's also a tool that can put it in there. They say it's nice to have, but don't necessarily have it. We're going to go ahead and get those lubed up and slid in there. I went ahead and ran a wire brush, which this is a inch and three-eighths, inch and a quarter, so OD would be inch and three-eighths. I ran that three there, was very careful to go only one direction with it. That cleaned it up, then I rinsed it out. Everything seems to be looking pretty good in there, so we should both slide that in and then get this thing back together. To make this kind of easy to see, so you get the spacer, the nylon, you got rubber, then you got the plastic rubber, plastic rubber, blah, blah, blah, blah, and rubber at the top. I'm going to lube that up, slide it on into the brass body, and hopefully everything seats in there correctly. So we ended up doing, was using four of the spacers here to continue shoving it further into the valve body. So now it's fully inserted all the way to the very back. You can tell, by the way, the spacers line up with the cuts in the bottom of the valve body. We've just taken out the four screws on the metering head here. We've got it popped out of there a little bit. Here's the propeller. That there, they said clean it up with some CLR and stuff, but I really don't have any type of lime or rust in there. Probably have plenty of lubrication from the freaking oil, but yeah, we're pretty good there on that. So I'm going to go ahead and get that o-ring replaced on the head here. I don't know if that was really worth taking apart. All it is, is it just spins as water goes through and it turns the dial. It's nothing extravaganza here. So I was going to clean that up a little bit and put her back together with a new o-ring. Going ahead and clean it up a little bit with the brush wheel. Got some of this corrosion tarnish, whatever, off of it. Looks a little bit better. It could be polished off with some polish cleaning type of stuff, I think, for brass. It probably would get it. Clean that all up there. It looks a lot better than what it did. Got the new o-ring on there. So we just got to lubricate that up and slide it on. The impeller got that cleaned up. It just goes in there like that right there. And it spins like that. There's a gear in there. The other piece there fits on that little spindle. See how it spins? And then I took and put a scratch on this before I took it out, but it just so happens that that dot right there and that nipple looking thing there, all go to the top. Blow in there and you can see it spin. So we're definitely free spinning. We just loosened up these screws, taken that off. We got o-rings for here. One that goes down in there, I believe. So that's going to get replaced. All right, we just pulled the top off there. There's the other o-ring there. There's a screen. So the most part, we really don't have a lot of gunk in there. It's just that oil crap. I mean, it's kind of disturbing. But there's the pieces there that go in there. So we'll get those put in there. You can pretty well just follow along and take out one, put one back in. This is, I've never done this before and it's pretty brain dead. What we've done so far is we put a piece of tape over this thing. Like I said, I've seen people use condoms and all kinds of different things. It's not that crazy that, you know, it's going to like penetrate through there. So we've got that all the way down. There's like a, at the bottom of this tank, there's a spot that's kind of more pointed. And so it went right down into that point. And I went ahead and poured a little bit in there to begin with, just to kind of get a start as everything's kind of centered now. That was just a quarter of a bag. So now we've got the rest of this bag. You can see it's kind of a gold color, similar to that right there. It's really interesting is, is when you tilt it, it, the way it starts to dry, you see it change color there. But I'm hoping that basically it's fouled. That looks like oil residue to me on top there. The laggy down here is really bad. So it looks worse than what it really is to a point. And we're going to fill up to about that mark right there, which is a lot less than what I originally figured it would take. Went ahead and lubricated that on the inside and around the outside of that. We've got our head piece here, ready to go. That's got new O-ring there at the bottom, new O-ring there. Everything's lubed on that. We got the new flat seal on top underneath that stainless in between the brass and the plastic. And then there's a screen in there and then a white orifice looking thing that had to be screwed into place. So we just gotta slide that down the rest of the way. We got it right down in there nice and tight. Gonna go ahead and put our ring back on. That piece here goes right around like that. This one here locks onto that one. It doesn't compress anything. It just keeps it from popping up because when that's pressurized it's going to lift up. That's just squeezing it from top to bottom. That went on there, which locked into between the two of them. One of the last things that's going to have to go in there is this right here. What that does is it actually moves back and forth. There's a motor right there and it pushes this forward and backwards. And what it does is that green thing moves forward and back and it directs the flow of water one way or the other. The meter here spins the little timer mechanism here. The clock that's plugged in the wall. Only thing it does is it tells it what time it is in the morning that it goes into regeneration, which generally I think is two o'clock. So we just gotta finish putting the few pieces onto it. I've got the brass all cleaned up. We should be able to hopefully reuse everything. Everything's kind of brass to brass and copper to copper. So we get it all looped up. Slides are in. This here freely moves in and out. I got that silicone on there. That should be spreading across. When I put that head on it should push this the rest of the way back in. I put a little bit of that silicone grease on those fittings. That should snug them back up. That piece right there pulled in perfect to the head. We've got everything back together. I popped that back off to kind of show you again. I don't know if I got it on video or not, but there's that little orifice, the white mylar plastic thing there and then that screen. That little cover there goes over top of it. I had an extra one of those part of the kit, that little white mylar that I didn't have to use and I had about two extra o-rings. Got everything back together here and there. Got the time set. I've got the pin there. They gave you a new pin for it. There it is. Right there you can see it. So that's on there ready to go. That's the part, like I said, it goes in and out based off of when it calls for it. There's the actuator and things like that, which that changed the valve back here in the back. That's how it siphons the salt water in to clean the resin. The salt doesn't actually soften the water. It just cleans the resin, but I'm sure you already knew that. I went ahead and closed my bypass, opened my outgoing side and went upstairs and got the closest fixture, which is the bathtub. So it's going to just shoot right over to that and up. That will help keep anything that might be in the pipes that might have broke loose from going through some of the faucets that have strainers. So I'm just opening this up slowly before we open it up all the way. So I'm just going to let it fill up. Now I'm going to run through regeneration that way. I know that it's actually siphoning. I've got res care on this thing, which is a resin treatment system. This stuff here actually helps take care of any iron build up on it, automatically filled right there on that little container right there. That container has a little wick in it. And what it does is it slowly adds some of that resin stuff at a predetermined drip level. You can kind of see there. Get a better shot for you. We're a little bit low on it, but yeah, it has a little wick and it just comes and just dumps it down into there. We've got our resin good to go. I can hear the water going through and it sounds like it's starting to feed through. I just put it into the first stage of regeneration. I'm not seeing any leaks. It purged out some air looking pretty good. Water comes down through the tube. It comes over and goes into the sub pump. So as long as we don't have any leaks, we're all done. So if you guys enjoyed the video and you want to see more like it, don't forget to hit the thumbs up button. Don't forget to check us out on Facebook and Instagram. And just remember, I'm not a plumber. I just play one on YouTube. So until next time guys, we'll catch you on the next one.