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Water softeners
I hate to break the news here..... but if you buy a new softener and it uses less salt than the old one, one of the was set up WRONG.
The salt usage is predicated on the amount of hardness present in the water. If you go too long between regeneration cycles you are running hard water past the resin bed toward the end of the cycle.
To do it right you MUST know the hardness value of the water and follow the manufacturers directions for the time between recharge cycles.
This is vitally important if you are also feeding an under-sink RO system. Any exposure to hard water will scale the membrane and render it useless in short order.
Below is a link to the type of kit I use. They also have test strips, but I have no experience with those.
Link:
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Water softeners
Well, there you have it! I have never used a cheap softener, so apparently there is a gap in my experience. Setting the re-gen cycle on a simple timer like that is, to my mind, wasteful and grossly inefficient.
You wouldn't have to buy too many wasted bags of salt at $4-$8 a bag before you could have bought a "smarter" system.
I have a two tank, high-capacity system. My water runs 38 grains hard and that means that each tank can only soften about 600 gallons of water. With a 4 person household and an RO system, we regenerate every day or two.
I probably use 300+ pounds of salt a month.
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Yup... 38 grains per gallon is considered very hard. I live in a highly mineralized zone...... just over the hill from the famous Comstock Lode in Virginia City. Hence our ground water has a very high mineral content.
Reverse Osmosis removes up to 99 percent of the minerals and toxins from the water. We have significant amounts of arsenic and mercury in the soil and in the river water down in the valley. The RO filters all that stuff out.
The down side is it takes quite a bit of water to do that. I probably get 1 gallon of pure drinking/cooking water for every 5 gallons that goes through the machine.
My soft water runs about 1200 parts per million of dissolved solids. That 1200 PPM is composed of sodium chloride from the softener plus all the non-calcium/magnesium minerals and toxins in the well water.
After the RO process the product water runs about 10 PPM so in my case it is removing 99.99 percent of the dissolved minerals and such.
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So sez the rumor.
When I was doing Dialysis tech work in SoCal the water there was about the same general quality as my present well water.
With the RO technology 30 years ago I was able to produce water for the dialysis machines that was about 130 PPM of dissolved solids, and I thought I was doing well.
Then I moved to Anchorage and was amazed to find the deep wells that supplied the city back then produced water even cleaner than the the RO product in California. As I recall the tap water was 90 PPM or less.
All that to say this: In the grand scheme the difference in purity between 10 PPM and 90 PPM is insignificant. Yet no one living in Anchorage at that time or in the previous 60 years, had suffered any ill effects from drinking such pure water.
Your blood serum and interstitial body fluids have about the same salinity as sea water. Any level of fresh water introduced into the system would be considered to be a diluting factor by comparison.
The kidneys sense the required levels of minerals needed in the body and conserve vital elements when they run low, and they remove excesses when there is an overload.
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One more note on water treatment systems: they generally don't tell you when they start pooping out.
The only way to know that the ion exchange on the softener is working properly over time is to test the water with a kit like the one I linked to earlier.
I would only spend the money if the ground water was real hard or if using an RO for drinking water.
But with the RO..... I think you have to test it. It will give no indication that the is a tear in the membrane or that is is worn out and just passing the water through.
I have a link below to a simple and effective tester. You just stick it in a glass of feed water and then stick it in a glass of treated water and read the difference.
Link:
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Just to be clear: the RO is a membrane, not a filter, but it has pre-filters to remove chlorine(which is harmful to the membrane)and sediments.
It might have a post, or finishing filter also.... usually it is carbon based too.
When I talk of testing, I am referring to testing the salt rejecting quality of the RO membrane, not the pre or post filters.
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