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Water softeners
I'm not biting Kenny  .
Anywho, where do you fall on Murf's scale?
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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
DR,
Somewhat true but also somewhat not. Many softener controls were simple timers where they started a regeneration every "x" number of days, whether the unit needed it or not. The newer electronic controls measure the amount of water passing through and base regeneration on that (along with the hardness, amount of salt, etc programmed in). In our case we noticed a significant drop in salt usage with the new unit with electronic controls. Both the old and new units were set with the same hardness level, but most times our new unit will go 6 or 7 days without regeneration, yet when we have a house full of guests for a weekend it may regen in 3 days. Our old unit was set to 4 days, and most of those types of controls only allow a max of 5 days between cycling.
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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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Water softeners
DR; Wow, that seems like a lot of salt, but then I don't really understand the hardness scale at 38 either, so maybe your water is super hard. I don't want to appear too dumb but what is an RO system? Frank.
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Water softeners
RO = Reverse Osmosis. RO pretty much takes everything out of the water and some say the good taste as well. I never cared for water softeners because the water makes you feel like you can't get the soap or shampoo rinsed off your skin. We just run our drinking water through a 1 micron water filter. On occasion after very heavy rain, the well water gets cloudy. I run the water slowly on the outside hydrant for a few days and it clears right up. Helps to keep my pond water level up as well.
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Water softeners
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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Doesn't RO water leach the minerals from your body?
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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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I have had a Mermaid (now bought out by culligan) water softner. Have had it for 10 years now and its still going strong. Also have had my R/O water system (drinking) for the same time. I have rplacd the filters only 3 times and the water is like night and day. Drink it with out the r/o and you get a bad swampy after taste. Drink it after the R/O and you can't taste a damm thing?
My well water does not smell or anything just tastes bad.
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11-29-2006, 06:18 
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