On Tuesday, October 22, 2013 11:00:41 PM UTC-4, wrote:
On Tue, 22 Oct 2013 12:21:31 -0700 (PDT), jamesgang






Hard water is very common in many parts of the us. Particularly rural wells.

Our well water is fairly hard. I got a water softener off craigs list

but still need to re-plumb to hook it up. You don't want to soften the

outside faucets and many people leave the kitchen cold tap off as well

for drinking water. Water softeners substitute sodium for the calcium

and magnesium in hard water. Too much sodium is bad for people with

heart issues. How much sodium ends up in the water depends on how much

calcium there was to begin with and how effective the water softener is.

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This does not pertain to my original question, since that is in a city.

However, lets say that a person lives in a rural area with a well. They

use a water softener. Generally those same people have a septic tank.

I've seen the large amount of salt that is used for softeners, often

several hundred pounds weekly. All that salt is going into the septic

tank. That would devour a metal septic tank in a short time, and if the

tank is concrete, all that sale must accumulate, and leach out from the

drain field. That must do a lot of damage to the soil and environment

around them.



Even those connected to a city municipal sewer system are dumping large

amounts of salt into the sewer system. Where does it all go? We're not

talking a teaspoon of salt here.......

I once worked for a hospital doing maintenance work, and I was in charge

of filling the brine tanks for that building. Every two weeks we would

dump 10 to 14 bags of salt in them. That's 50lb bags. So, that would

be 500 to 700 lbs of salt every two weeks, or roughly 15,000 lbs per

year, which is 7 to 8 tons of salt each year just from one building.

That's a lot of salt which ends up somewhere down the sewer pipes. If

you ask me, that could result in an eventual environmental disaster....

First no one is using 500lbs of salt every two weeks. Second, don't run the regenerate drain into the septic system. Simple. The world is full of salt, I don't think it's going to become an environmental disaster.