No-Salt Water softener

[Flying Tivo]

Hello:

Ive been doing some research on water softeners and came across this No-Salt Aquasana system. I have no problem with hardness for the pool, but i have just installed new Faucets(hansgrohe), Shower(hansgrohe), toilets(toto), dishwasher(viking),Ice maker(viking) and water heaters(Rinnai) in the house and want to take good care of them as they are quite expensive. Salt based system as you know need quite the maintenance and are not that Eco friendly. Aquasana claims that it can restructure Ions of the hard minerals and clump them together so they wont stick to the pipes(probably by changing the charge). So in theory they dont eliminate Hard minerals, they just prevent them from adhering to surfaces. On Aquasana site I can read some mixed reviews but mostly positive. Anybody have any experience with this kind of system?? I can be the guinea pig if need so!:uhh:

Felipe

 

[JohnT]

Just like with pool water, you should do a water test on your tap water to see if you could benefit from any treatment.

 

[JoyfulNoise]

That's pure quackery, plain and simple. Like putting magnets on your copper pipes to change the "energy" of the ions in solution. Here is one of my favorite sites for debunking just about every nonsense pseudoscience claim about water -

Water pseudoscience and quackery

The sites author is Stephen Lower and he is a retired professor of chemistry. The AquaSana systems looks like nothing more than a dual-tank softener where they use filtration media and granular activated charcoal to remove chlorine and suspended solids. The water than passes through an exchange resin where the calcium and magnesium is removed and, very likely, hydrogen is exchanged. So, in essence, this media would be exchanging metal cations (Ca2+ & Mg2+) for hydrogen ions (H+) and would thus lower the pH of the water. Then, in order to keep the acidic water from attacking your pipes, there's probably another tank filled with crushed limestone (calcium carbonate) to raise pH. Limestone post-filters are used in a lot of reverse-osmosis systems to restore pH and some small amount of calcium since RO water tends to have a low pH of 6.5-6.9 which is not good for copper pipes.

The hype that salt-based softeners are "bad" is just that, hype. Salt based softeners DO NOT add salt (sodium chloride) to your water. They exchange calcium ions for sodium ions. The salt part of the softener only comes into play when the unit is regenerating the resin bed by pumping brine solution in and forcing the brine solution through the exchange resin bed. The high concentration of sodium ions in the brine forces the exchange resin to give up all of the calcium it removed from the water and replaces all of the calcium stored in the resin bed with sodium so that the media can once again perform the task of removing calcium (the "regeneration" process). That salty, calcium laden brine water is discharged into your sanitary sewer line where your municipal water supplier then deals with it. Do the muni suppliers hate softeners? Sure. But they also get paid lots of money by their customers to deal with it so they can just suck it up and do their jobs. It's far cheaper and environmentally sustainable for them to deal with it at their facility and spread the extra cost around then to have everyone tapping wells into the ground and/or using softeners and dumping the water into their septic systems.

Go with a salt-based water softener with a GAC prefilter to remove chlorine and sediment and you'll be fine. These newer dual tank systems simply use the same technology but packaged a little differently and then they rope you in to having to exchange the tanks on a regular basis. I bet if you compare their tank replacement schedule and cost with the operational life of a standard salt system that you would find their systems to cost you a lot more money.

 

[Flying Tivo]

Matt:

Awesome Link and great explanation.

Thanks

Felipe

 

[cfherrman]

Hey Matt, softeners do add salt to your water, If I recall, 8 ppm salt per grain of harness, so at 250 ppm, or 14 grains, my water softener adds 112 ppm salt.

 

[Teald024]

Hey Matt, softeners do add salt to your water, If I recall, 8 ppm salt per grain of harness, so at 250 ppm, or 14 grains, my water softener adds 112 ppm salt.

No additional "salt" is added. Only Ca and Mg are exchanged for Na. you water already had "salt" in it, the softener is just exchanging one metal for another. Yes the Na in introduced to the system, but Ca and Mg are removed. When people have issues with "salt" it is the Na that causes it, not the "salt".

Here is a better way of saying it "8 ppm Na per grain of harness, so at 250 ppm, or 14 grains, my water softener adds 112 ppm Na".

 

[JoyfulNoise]

In theory, yes, the exchange resin adds no salt. In practice, all salt based softeners will add some residual sodium chloride to the water as it is impossible to flush the resin bed fully clean of the brine solution. Softeners can perform multiple flush cycles after a regeneration but it has to be balanced against excess water usage. So, in the end, there is some residual salt but it is minimal.

Most municipal water suppliers keep their chloride levels below 100ppm with a target level typically set near 50ppm. Even if a softer added 150ppm salt, you'd only be somewhere around 200-250ppm salt. That is completely undetectable to human taste and would only be a concern to those who have renal disease. The effect on a pool would be minimal and could easily be handled through normal backwash & splashout. Sodium compounds do not contribute to scale in anyway so there’s no consequence to having some excess salt in the pool.