If you have more than 3-4 gpg of hardness in your water, you'll spend
more money to heat water, replace water heaters and/or electric
elements and other water using appliances and to wash and replace
clothes and fixtures that will wear out prematurely etc. than to buy a
softener and maintain it. Of course that means you don't pay gobs more
bucks for it than you could have.

All the water used in the house should be treated, not just the water
heater cold feed. And there should not be a hard water line run to the
kitchen sink, or toilets etc.. The people that think they get a
benefit out of drinking hard water need to look up how much water
they'd have to drink to get any benefit from the minerals in it. And
drinking too much water will kill you.

The added sodium caused by ion exchange softening, if using softener
salt instead of potassium chloride (salt substitute) which is not as
efficient as 'salt' because all cation softening resins are made in
the sodium form, is 7.85 mg/l (roughly a quart) per gpg of exchange.
Thirty five gpg = 274.75 mg/liter (or quart).

Most of us are npt drinking the 8 8oz glasses of water we are supposed
to so how many are ingesting a quart of softened water a day?

An 8 oz glass of V8 is like 560 mg of sodium. Same size glass of skim
milk, about 530. A slice of white bread, from 120-160 mg. On'n on.
Some people could eat a few less chips or other snack foods and drink
a gallon or more of their softened water and actually REDUCE their
daily sodium intake. But they see all that salt they pour in their
salt tank disappear and mistakenly think it all went into their water.
It doesn't. A softener only uses a small amount of the sodium, all the
rest and all the chloride goes out the drain line.

People on sodium restricted diets know how to count their daily uptake
and can adjust accordingly. Healthy people get much more sodium than
the body requires but drinking softened water doesn't add near as much
as some would have us believe.

BTW, all waters contain some sodium to begin with, check your water
company's water quality report or have a sodium test done on your well
water and see.

The vast majority of people with water softeners say their coffee and
tea tastes better or there is no difference. Hardness (calcium and
magnesium) is a small part of all the stuff in the TDS (total
dissolved solids) content of a water. They cause taste problems much
more easily than hardness does.

Gary Slusser
Quality Water Associates