Jim...
Also check out Kinetico. If you do a search here, you'll see that several members including myself are using the Kinetico to battle rising CH. It sure has improved my situation. My city water is pretty hard at 200ppm. After running through the water softener, CH drops to 25ppm. I am using a Kinetico dual tank soft water system, so I am not really concerned with slightly increased re-generations of the softener since when one tank is regenerating the other is providing soft water. The tanks switch over automatically and as the name implies, it uses kinetic energy and not electricity for regeneration .
Salt consumption for the softener increased by about a 1/4 after plumbing the soft water line to the pool autofill line. A bit more in the summer but still, it's not bad. For the house and the pool, about 1 bag of salt per month on average. A bag of salt will run around $5.00 or so at Home Depot.
I'm super pleased with the results. When I started using the softener the pool CH was north of 600 and climbing. After a year and a half, of using the softener for evaporation and filter backwash compensation, my CH is 425 and is still dropping at a slow rate. That is why that I recommend using a 3-way valve between your city water and your soft water like I did. I can always use the ball valve to switch between the two to prevent CH from dropping too low. You can get an idea of how I did mine here and as Matt suggested, I also use a water meter which is reviewed in the following thread as well.
Good luck...
r.