Do I need a water softener? - Let's do an EXPERIMENT!

It's time to apply some science! Let's dive into how a water softener actually works. A lot of people think they add salt to your water and that makes your water soft. This is half true and half false.

Water softeners work on the principals of ion exchange. The units contain billions of tiny resin beads and those beads have a static charge. If you wash those beads with a salt water solution, the sodium ions will attach themselves to the resin beads. Then if you run hard water through the newly charged resin beads, the beads will release their sodium ion in exchange for a hard water ion. When that happens, you now have soft water.

After a long enough period of time, the billions of resin beads are all holding onto a hard water ion. When this happens, they lose their ability to further soften water. This is where regeneration comes into play! The unit will close itself off from the house water and begin to wash the resin with a salt water solution. This causes the beads to release their hard water ion and exchange it for a sodium ion. After a quick rinse cycle, the unit is back into a ready state to soften water again!

Modern water softener units do a great job of knowing exactly when to regenerate as long as you program them properly with the hardness level of your water. The unit knows how many grains of hardness the resin bed can handle. So once you tell it you home's water hardness, it will do all the math for you and regenerate when it needs to.

All water softeners soften to zero so it's not effective to try to cheat the system and program the unit with a hardness level that's different than your actual hardness level. If anything, you might program the unit with a hardness level higher that your test results. This would keep things a bit more fresh. Especially if your hardness is testing under 12-14 grains of hardness.

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