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June 2, 2010

Why Water Softeners Need Salt

Many people have water softeners in their homes. Many of you that do don't understand how a softener works. Sure, it allows you to use less detergent in the laundry and your soap lathers much better in the shower, but how does it work?

Hardness in water is actually calcium. Hardness is also a few trace minerals like magnesium and iron, but the majority of this hardness is calcium. Calcium, when dissolved in water forms what's called a cation. That is, it takes on a positive charge.

All this calcium is what makes soap harder to lather, which makes it undesirable in your water for cleaning purposes. Many people who live in areas with very hard water will install a water softener to take out all the hardness.

A water softener is simply a vessel filled with thousands and thousands of little beads called an ion exchange resin. The resin will remove the calcium from the water in a process called ion exchange. This process can remove the calcium in your water only by substituting another element in its place. In this case, the element is sodium.

The salt you add to your softener is actually sodium chloride. When introduced into water, it dissolves into two compounds: A positively charged sodium atom and a negatively charged chloride atom. As the water passes through this resin, the resin takes a calcium ion and gives up a sodium ion.

The end result is a concentration of sodium ions in your water in place of the calcium ions, and sodium ions do not contribute to hardness in your water.

Eventually the resin becomes depleted of all of it's sodium ions so it must be replenished. This is what happens when your softener system goes into backwash. If flushes out all the calcium to drain and replenishes all of the sodium lost to the ion exchange process.

This is why your softener needs salt and why you must keep replacing it.

It's a good method for making nice soft water for cleaning. But remember, the calcium is replaced with sodium on a 1:1 basis. This may mean that you end up with a large amount of sodium in your water which is not good for people with hypertension and heart disease. If you do install a softener, it is in your best interest to have the plumber bypass the lines to your kitchen sink so you can use this water for drinking and cooking without high concentrations of sodium.




Article  By Mike Mandell



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