"Using an electronic water conditioning system" to achieve what?

Electronic water conditioning does not soften water or remove hardness.

Had a comprehensive water test dome?
What is it about your water that is unsatisfactory?

It is for our elderly neighbor that I am asking. We have very hard water,but what he seems to be mostly concerned with is calcium and lime. The information he had, was from a company named Vitasalus. His soft water system is in the basement and he has a hard time getting salt down there. Cost involved in delivery I think might be the concern with hiring someone to do that. My husband is out of town, so I told him I would ask online. Thanks for your time.

To "soften" water is to remove calcium (among other things like iron) from water, not calcium deposits from pipes, and that is commonly done by one of two methods.

One method is ion exchange as done by a water softener. A water softener exchanges either sodium ions (if using NaCl) or potassium ions (if using KCl as a SALT SUBSTITUTE) for calcium (and other) ions in the hard water. That's it, no ifs, no ands, no buts, and no sales double talk. Simple chemistry and physics. Softening water is not black magic. It is physics and chemistry with a side of mechanics. No matter how hard sales people try (and want) to they can not violate the laws of physics or change the nature of chemical actions and reactions.

The other is by a filter and/or membrane techology or distillation, but no simple filter will remove calcium. You would need a reverse osmosis unit large enough to service your entire house. You would not want to pay for that big an RO nor pay for the service and routine maintenance it would require and RO water would be very aggressive in your plumbing and it would waste a lot of water.

NO magnet(ic) gizmo or electronic gizmo or "conditioner" will soften water but people waste their money on them EVERYDAY.

Check out this URL for one story http://www.nmsr.org/magnetic.htm and there are many more on the net if you Google.

If your neighbor has a properly sized and properly setup softener installed it should be regenerating every 6 or 7 days. That would require salt replenishing of one to two bags a month.

Surely there's someone who could assist your neighbor a couple times a month.

Tried some electronic stuff myself and then switched to the plain salt types.
Maybe interesting to know is that some softeners are volume based, which means that they measure the used water volume and do not regenerate until the set amount has been reached. Meaning that they will regenerate less when you use less (holiday, ...) and that you will have to add salt less frequently then.

What you need to know is that effectiveness of these systems ranges from worthless to fraudulent. You can search this forum and get the answer you are looking for.

I'm all for painting purveyors of magnetic & "electronic" softeners as charlatans. Such "systems" will not remove hardness minerals from water. Ion exchange replenished with a salt is the only so-far viable method to accomplish that.
However, ahem, HOWEVER, there appears to be data supporting such devices in the prevention of scale in piping systems. Reports can be read online.
Scale prevention does not equal softness.

Alphonse,

That's why I didn't simply say fraudulent.

For the homeowner, this scale prevention - to the extent that a given device actually does scale prevention, which is a separate issue - isn't typically of much value. As I understand it, these scale prevention properties are not effective when the water has been heated -as in preventing scale build up in a water heater. Neither would it be helpful in a situation where the water evaporates - such as in the dishwasher, shower surfaces, etc.

If a product was sold as a device that would prevent scale in cold water pipes (and it actually was effective) that would be one thing... but that's typically not what home consumers want and that's typically not what is being sold to them.