I used to live where the water was very hard... but now, at this house/in this city I am very lucky, no hard water, and it tastes good straight out of my faucet. I know, how lucky I am.

Moni

I have a Fleck 5600sx based softener I bought on Amazon for $550 and couldn't be happier.

I should have done it long ago.

FYI: Resin in any softener will typically last 10-15 years.

No need for a water softener here. I do use a filter on my kitchen faucet, though, as I don't care for the chlorine taste.

What is an R. O. faucet?

Rusty

Have a water softener (kenmore) that came with the house when I bought it, along with whole house filter, love it

Reverse osmosis (RO) is the more modern technology to treat water that's hard or has impurities. Water softeners are the old way and it's an approach that has many negatives.

We have a LifeSource Whole House Water System.

We have a Culligan system.

We have a softener system from a company called Clearwater. They offer a whole host of systems and help you choose the best one for your situation since the problems vary. We have a lot of dissolved iron. This one is better than the previous system we had. We have two filters, a pre system filter (we are on a well so have a pressure switch to protect) and a whole house filter. This one doesn't use electricity but works off of water pressure and uses very little salt.

Lindsey, I looked at the Life Source website and it seemed evasive about what the technology was. Do they provide that info to customers? It says there's a periodic backflushing, how much water does that use?

Yes, our well water has a lot of minerals in it including iron. So much iron that prior to the filter our undies were turning pink in the laundry. Not to mention the red rings in the toilet, etc.

The house in town is on city water and there is no need for a filter there.

Our last house had really hard well water, lots of iron in it. But the water softener took care of most, but not all of it.

In this house our well water does not have a lot of iron in it, so much easier to keep up with the cleaning and the whites do not turn orange! We have a much smaller water softener here and it does a good job.

We were thinking about having as system and my husband's cardiologist was fine with it but he suggested having at least one faucet that was not connected to it. He mentioned several other filters that could be used on that faucet. His concern was because of the material used in the machines could raise my husband's blood pressure. Decided not to have one as neither of us like the not quite clean feeling of our skin when we have stayed at places that used water softeners.

No, no need.

Our water is bottled and sold, no need for any treatment.

BTW, a RO wastes a ton of water and isn’t really needed except for the most dire of contaminated water. A standard filtration system can get rid of most impurities just fine.

maifleur01, that is how the skin actually feels when there's no remaining mineral residue or soap curd. :-)

dadoes that I also how your skin feels when you use salt water to wash with. With many water softeners the water is ran through salt. What do you think those bags of stuff that need to be added periodically are full of.

Indeed, Dadoes, there is a lot of confusion and misinformation:

A water softener does something very specific: It exchanges the hardness ions in water (calcium and magnesium) with sodium ions. Yes, the resin bed is flushed with water after the brine cycle. The water is not ""run through salt". The amount of sodium in the water is therefore roughly equal to the amount of hardness in the water before treatment. A glass of soft water has less sodium than a slice of bread or a glass of milk. Nonetheless, it's still common that a faucet (in the kitchen, for example) provides unsoftened water for drinking and cooking.

Dadoes is also correct about skin feel... that's what your skin is supposed to feel like. Soap will combine with the hardness in the water to leave behind soap scum on your skin. When that film isn't on your skin because of soft water your skin feels different. Your shower will also stay cleaner when you have soft water for the same reason.

Modern water softeners work well. They aren't "old technology" that has been replaced by something else.

Water filters can refer to anything that generally removes things from the water.

Typical are:

Sediment filters for removing sand, silt, etc.

Carbon filters for improving taste, odor, chlorine and some VOC's.

Reverse Osmosis filters for removing just about everything.... but at a high cost in water and filters. Usually R/O is only used for drinking water because it is so expensive to process.

Specialty filters for removing Iron, sulfur, etc.

The "Life Source" filter is a whole house backwashing carbon filter. It doesn't soften the water. Carbon filters don't remove hardness. It's questionable why you would need a whole-house carbon filter - but if you wanted that... you could buy one for much less, minus the marketing nonsense.

"Jake the Wonder Dog" has nailed the information about water softeners. The information about filters is accurate also - I wonder if he is in the water business.

Now, to answer the original query: Yes, I do have a water softener made by Hanson with controls by Fleck. They have an installer in Menomonee Falls, WI, a village next door to mine. Mine is set to cycle per every 8000 gallons. The number of gallons is based on hardness of the water; More hardness, the fewer gallons processed before cycling. (My old one was based on a time period. This one is much better.) This one has a turbine flow meter ahead of the softener that triggers a refresh cycle after 8000 gal has passed though the unit. It does require electricity to operate the flushing and recharge mechanism. Our water is not very hard, but we do need to treat the water else the water heater will build up calcium (and other) deposits and require replacement or cleaning about every 5 years. Other appliances will build up scum and deposits, too. With a good softener, water heaters (in my area) will last until it has a different type of failure. Typical failures are leaks, controls, or the down-tube drops off allowing incoming water to mix with the hot water at the top of the heater. Depending on brand and resistance to corrosion, a good water heater here will last 30 yrs with a softener in my area.

All faucets inside my house have softened water except the cold water kitchen faucet. The permits one to draw un-softened water for drinking or cooking. The 2 outside faucets are not softened.

Our home is well fed. No city sewer or water. We looked into our options when we moved in. We have a high iron content that makes it near impossible to get my wash as stain free as I could when we were on city water. RO is the most expensive system out there and if you have it one shouldn't need anything else i. e. whole house filter/water softener etc. for cleaning water. Due to the cost we opted for the whole house and water softener. I can't stand the feel of hard water drying out my skin. People experiencing softened water for the first time often describe a 'slimy' feeling. Soap foams better in softened water and rinses cleaner out of clothes etc. Most systems have a kitchen faucet that is not fed by the softener, for cooking and drinking purposes. How do you think water companies and other bottled water sources purify their water? Filters and salts are part of the process. Water in different parts of the country is "harder" than others. In the military we experienced homes with and without softeners. My husband insists we have one and I can tell immediately when showering, if the softener runs out of salt pellets. I worked at a green house for years and they had RO to water the flowers. My boss said the water in our town was so 'naturally' bad it would kill a house plant in a year if you used tap water to water with. Like everything else water quality and the impurities there in vary greatly from town to town, home to home. There is not one size fits all solution. The variables are many.

I wish I had a water softening system...the last time I got to regularly experience softened water was before I moved out of my childhood home around age 20, my parents had bought that house with a water softener (the much older variety, as the house was built around 1965 and they purchased it from the original owner in 1973). When they decided to move to Nebraska, they flew out 6 months ahead of that move to choose a lot in a neighborhood with one of the major residential building developers here and selected their layout, whatever upgrades from the builder grade they wanted and make choices in color/design that were builder grade standard options - one of their selected upgrades was a water softener, but a newer and better kind. Installing a system at my previous residence in SoCal was beyond what the budget would allow, and when we made the cross country move to Nebraska, there was no water softening system in the house we bought here and to install one would have meant sacrificing other home improvements, moving around some funds in other household budget categories as well, in order to have the money available. So the water softener simply wasn't enough of a priority, though I do hope to get one installed at some point, it just won't be in the next few years.

Jen, I know what you mean about other priorities. Just know there are some great deals on Fleck based softeners on Amazon. Mine was $550 (and then I installed it).

We are on well water. We do not have a water softener because it wasn't needed. We only have a sediment filter.

I have a whole-house service that replaces the charcoal canister for about $30/month. Check on a site like nextdoor.com to see who does this locally for you. Looks like Culligan does this nationally.

https://www.culligan.com/home/water-filtration/whole-house-water-filters

Yes. We do. Have had water softeners since moving to this area. We have had both brine tank within the salt tank and separate salt and brine tank over the years. They all work. Space permitting the latter is preferred. We bought from a local water conditioning service. In fact next week they are going to install a sediment and chlorine removal system for us, It will bypass the softener so we can have filtered hard hard water for drinking and cooking. It's sort of a mini whole house system downsized to our specific needs.

Thank both of you Jake the wonder dog and Jimdandy for the information. I went to bed before I saw your answers. If that slime feel is clean skin I will stay dirty. Interesting that I use a scraper similar to what was used in ancient times held over from when I used oil treatments for dry skin when I felt slimy and the stuff that was on my skin dripped like loose jelly from it.

Is that the one with the salt? We had one in our home we lived in when I was in high school, and I had the most beautiful hair during those years. So silky and shiny and it went away after I moved out, so I've always wondered if it was the softener.

I dislike the slippery, "soap won't wash off" feeling of soft water. I hate it when I encounter that in a hotel.

We once bought a house that had a water softener installed, I shut it off, the water was normal thereafter, as would be expected.

We have a system more than anything because we have Hydronic heat (heated water that goes through tubes in the floor) and we also have Iron Oxidizing Bacteria. By keeping iron levels low we keep the harmless but clogging bacteria out of our systems. System that just remove iron are staggeringly expensive so we opt for softening that will also remove iron. Our salt pellets have additions that remove iron. It also keeps our laundry white and toilet tanks clear. It is recommended to kill the bacteria by disinfecting your well with bleach but it appears to be throughout the aquifer around here so that never works.

@Jake The Wonderdog

The space available for a water softener is another concern - our furnace and water heater is in what my parents and just about everyone who has done any reno/repair/upgrade work at the house have called a "furnace room". There's also a drain in the floor because of the water heater and all the plumbing stuff from upstairs leads to that room at some point in the pipes, the laundry room shares the wall on the east facing side. On the western facing wall is a bathroom, the garage backs up to the south wall. The one in my parents' old house had the giant barrel part in the garage next to a concrete step-up area for the laundry machines and the door from the garage into the house, then the water heater on about a 2 foot tall concrete platform like thing in the corner. In their new house, the water heater and softener is in the middle of 3 partially finished basement rooms that are built underneath where the garage and some portion of the front of the house is. I don't know where we could fit a softener into the space we have - when we were in the process of having the basement put back together after a blocked pipe caused water damage the summer of 2018, the water heater had to be disconnected for part of the work and then some valve thingy busted and turned it into a geyser. Replaced the water heater after that, but getting the old one out of the way for the previous work being done and later moving a new one in was a VERY tight fit. The crew of guys who did most of the work had to dismantle the sections of drywall they'd just put up to get it in, otherwise they would have had to disconnect the furnace/central air unit (during the hottest months of the year) as well as adding even more time to the process. The crew basically did everything but plumbing and heat/air, which were handled by two other contractors with the company they were subcontractors with. An entirely different company did the water remediation portion (removing all damaged sections of drywall, insulation, door framing, LVP, carpet/pad, setting up the large/hot/noisy fans and left them running for 4 days before taking follow up moisture readings and giving the okay for the next phase - restoration and repair).

I'm waiting for the technology to get to a point where water softeners can be extremely compact, function at a high level, and for a decent length of time before needing replacement. :P No big deal, that'll happen before we die and/or sell the house! ;)

Jenn, Water softeners can be installed outdoors as long as you can run an electrical line for the timer. You can protect it from the elements with a small closet like garden tool shed.

We have a Kinetico water softener--made in the Us cost us either 6,000 0r 8000.00 but it does a good job. We have well water and it's really bad. Our neighbor has a Culligan and has to do her washing at her mothers.

I used to have one but it wasn't working right so my son took it out. I really don't notice the difference now after so long and I am saving the salt money. I may get another one one day.

We have soft water here in Los Angeles, but we have hard water at our house in Cathedral City, and the main problem is that we get calcium deposits at the waterfall from the spa to the pool. I have not noticed problems with the washing machine or dishwasher, and I have not noticed any problems with the rain shower heads either, but that might change.

I'm not sure why Palm Springs/Coachella Valley water is hard, but I do notice a difference from Los Angeles water.

I wish I had a water softener at my house here in Nebraska! We have hard water but at least its not well water like some of the neighborhoods here have!

My water softener hasn’t been working right for a while, I’ve started shopping around to have it replaced. We have hard well water with iron in it so it really is a must have.

We gave had Water Softeners for many years in 3 houses. 2 houses ago had well water with extremely hard water (21 grains). When we moved the city water was 11grains. Pretty hard but not as bad as well water. Last year we went to a shoe about how bad plastic bottles are for the environment and decided to put our money where our mouth is and installed a Culligan RO. It wastes much less water then most RO systems, runs to our sink and fridge which means the ice is RO. Reduced our soda intake and drink much more water now.