Plumbing leaks

Our water softener started leaking recently. Luckily we caught it before any damage was done to our house. You can see the new (blue) softener that I bought from Sears. This is just a rebranded GE softener.


Here you can see the point of failure on the old unit. It lasted 10 years which isn't too bad.


The softeners are essentially the same so I installed it using the existing plumbing. The new softener was a 1/4" too low but you can still get the connectors to fit. Or so I thought. It developed a very slow leak through one of the connections.


Here's the new connection that a plumber did. He removed the old fittings which I found out are threaded specifically for those water softeners. You can't use them on a standard thread. This would explain why I wasn't successful in hooking up the flex lines to the existing connectors. Luckily I was able to put the old bypass valve on so that we had running water until the plumber was able to fix it.