Water Softeners: Repair or Replace?

Water softeners are a wonderful thing, but they’re not a magic box and at some point in their life, they may require a service or repair. If you’ve bought a good one, that day comes a lot further down the road than it would with a cheaper, less reliable option.

Keith Martin has built a reputation at Southern Softflow for honest advice on water softeners, and this comes to the fore when it comes to weighing up repair against replacement. Between us, we’ve got nearly 70 years of experience, and there aren’t many problems we can’t fix. But fixing the immediate problem isn’t always the best long-term answer – and knowing the difference is where that experience counts.

Take a water softener that’s 12 years old; a non-electric softener like a Harvey or a Kinetico. These are our speciality; we’ve been installing and repairing them for nearly 30 years. What looks like a terminal fault to the untrained eye can sometimes be put right on the spot, for little more than a call-out charge.

Other times, a small problem is an early sign that a machine is nearing the end of its life. Even then, with the right experience, a full rebuild back to a fully working system is often possible.

What we recommend depends on you as much as the machine:

• For some customers, a rebuild is a lifeline – a fully working softener again, protecting the home, for a fraction of the cost of a new one.
• For others, it’s the reassurance of a 10-year warranty on a new machine that makes replacement worth the money, even when a repair was on the table.
• And for some, keeping the cost as low as possible for now is the priority – even though our experience tells us other parts may follow before too long.

There’s rarely just one right answer. We assess how you use your water softener, its history, and what matters most to you and recommend whatever gives the best outcome in the long run.

One thing we won’t do is recommend a replacement without properly getting to the bottom of the problem first. It’s genuinely alarmed us to see customers elsewhere being pushed towards a new machine when theirs was still under warranty and perfectly repairable.

If your water softener is playing up and you want honest advice on what to do next, get in touch. We can’t always promise the answer you’re hoping for but we can promise we’ve thought it through properly before we give it.