What can I use to test my home water salt level?

[dannieboiz]

I use the taylor test kit to test my pool.

I have a water softener and I'm trying to get measure for my house and garden hose. Appearantly the taylor kit min test is 200ppm. One drop changed the color of my water. Any recommendation for lower level testings?

 

[jblizzle]

If you use 25 milliliters of water that would make each drop 80ppm. Should use 2 drops of the initial reagent.

Or 50ml for 40ppm drops.

 

[dannieboiz]

If you use 25 milliliters of water that would make each drop 80ppm. Should use 2 drops of the initial reagent.

Or 50ml for 40ppm drops.

original test calls for 10ml of water, if I did 50ml of water, how many initial reagent should I use? 5 drops?

 

[dannieboiz]

did 100ml and got what i needed.

 

[JoyfulNoise]

Three points -

1. You can just use 1 drop of the chromate indicator, 2 at most. It's entire purpose is to just detect the end point by turning red, it will do this at any concentration.

2. Your water softener is adding sodium to the water, not chloride. It does this because sodium ions (Na+) are attached to the polymeric resin in the exchange unit. When your source water passes through it, the calcium ions (Ca2+) get preferentially exchanged with sodium (Na+) in a process where two ions of sodium are released for every one ion of calcium captured. Since the Taylor test is only sensitive to chloride ion (Cl-), you should see little difference between the input water and the treated water.

3. The better test to perform is the CH test. Take a sample of raw input water and post-softenener water and see what the difference is.