Luckily, it has a rubber o-ring in it, so it’s very easy to put
back provided you don’t do something foolish and damage it. After studying it a bit, I came to the
conclusion that there must be something in the center hole of the final filter cartridge
which pushes the plastic pin from the PureMometer up. I tried putting a wooden skewer down the
center hole of the cartridge. I hit some
slight resistance, and then I punched through.
When I put the filter back on, instead of a trickle, we had virtually
nothing. So it seems I made it worse.
The mechanism looks like this internally:
I think this thing works as follows. As the water comes in from the tank, it
passes over the water wheel. The water
wheel has a gear on it which hits the large gear on the top of the
nearest gear stack. That in turn has a
smaller gear on it that hits the top large gear on the opposite gear
stack. And they ping pong back and forth
downwards over three sets of gears. Finally
the bottom gear on the opposite stack drives the white gear in the foreground of the picture and spins the
blue PureMometer valve around…very, very slowly. The blue PureMometer valve is spring
loaded. When nothing is pressing up on
it, it comes down and cuts the water flow off nearly completely.
So the blue PureMometer pin is spring loaded and it turns. The bottom of it is also fluted and shaped a
bit like a drill bit. I think it is pressing
down on something or some substance in the center hole of the filter, and it
slowly drills through it over time. Once
it gets through, the spring pushes the blue pin all the way down and no more
water.
So what we need is something to press that blue pin back up into
the housing and allow the water to flow.
After looking around for a bit, I came up with a simple paperclip bent
as follows:
I then pressed it down into the top of the filter as shown here:
I was concerned that drill end of the spinning PureMometer pin
might catch on the paperclip, and with that massive gear reduction, it could
easily snap off that rather spindly pin.
So I also pulled the center gear out so the water wheel motion could not
transfer to the blue pin.
Now the blue pin is pushed up by the paperclip, and it is no
longer able to spin. I think that with a new
cartridge, even in the absence of the paperclip, removing the gear should keep
the drill bit from spinning, and the cartridge wouldn’t wear out, but because I
don’t have the new cartridge, I can’t inspect it closely enough to be
sure. As you can see, the paperclip
fully resets the pin.
Here is a shot of the faucet.
It’s running like a champ.
So I successfully bypassed it.
Now what about the water quality?
It stands to reason that the filter is designed to clean 500 gallons of
pretty much any household water. We
already have a salt-based whole house Kinetico softener/filter system ahead of
this filter anyway. And we’ve got fairly
decent city water. Without the whole
house filter, the water smells of chlorine, but otherwise, it’s fine. And it’s just statistically improbable we’d
have the worst case water in the nation.
We likely have fairly average water.
If you figure this filter can handle 500 gallons of worst case water, it
should not have a problem with 1000 gallons of ours. So I figure to extend this from three months
to six months. But now you do need to
keep an eye on it since it will never shut off on its own.
I bypassed this because I suspect this rather clever mechanism is almost surely for the benefit of Kinetico, not really for me, the consumer. It probably easily doubles the filter
revenue they take in. Once the quality of the water noticeably deteriorates, then I will
drop the $90 on a new filter at my discretion. I
don’t feel inclined to let Kinetico force me to do it before I think it’s
necessary.
Your mileage may vary, and it’s up to you to make sure your water
is still clean should you choose to bypass this shutoff mechanism. I take no responsibility for you, your
actions, Kinetico’s revenue, etc. So proceed with care and good luck.
