Your Kinetico may be too small for the job.(Disregard if it worked at one
time. ) It either has not a deep enough bed (should be around 31 inches)
(you may have a broken strainer and washed all the resin out) or you are
exceeding the flow rate for the unit. I think they usually will accept
about 10 GMP/cu ft of resin. The most likely thing is that there is also
some iron in the well water and it has fouled the resin to where it no
longer works. Five grains of hardness isn’t much (85 ppm ) usually people
don’t even buy a softener till they reach about 200 ppm of hardness. This
is not to say taking out the 85 won’t make your water much more pleasant or
that 150 ppm is any picnic to deal with. .Other things to look at, does your
brine at weigh 10 lbs per gallon? Does the softener draw about 4 gallons
of brine every time it regenerates? If it don’t draw it’s salt,, it is just
a wide spot in the pipe.
Or
What kind of water assay do you get after it passes through your
ion exchange tank? Could be it’s not doing what it is supposed to be
doing. Maybe a RO unit would be more efficacious.
Oh well Good luck either way