After living with hard water for many years, you are having a tough time getting used to the slippery feel of the softened water coming from your new water softener. What if you could make the water coming from your water softener just a little harder?
A water softener will remove as many hard minerals as it can. The water coming from a properly set water softener will be soft (0-1 grains of hardness). You can not make an adjustment on a water softener to make your water semi-soft.
If you are new to having a water softener, it can take a while before you become accustomed to the silky feel of softened water, after a while, most people learn to love their soft water, but in the meantime, here is why your water should ALWAYS feel soft.
How a water softener makes your water soft, and why it’s all or nothing!
A water softener removes hard minerals from your water because it contains water softening resin in its tank. Water softening resin are tiny beads that attract hard minerals to them, a little like when your clothes may stick together after coming out of the clothes drier.
Because this attraction is constant and automatic, the water softening resin in a water softener will attract as many hard minerals to its surface as it can.
As your water flows through the water softening resin, the resin will remove the hard minerals from the water until the water is free of all hard minerals, making the water soft.
When the water softening resin is newly regenerated, the resin closest to where the water comes into the water softener will be the first to remove hardness from the water and then any hardness that is not removed by that resin will be removed by the resin farther into the tank.
This process will continue until all of the resin has removed hard minerals to their maximum capacity. At this point, your water will flow over the resin but will no longer have the hard minerals removed from it, or in other words, you will have hard water.
This is why when water goes through a properly working water softener it will ALWAYS come out softened.
A water softener does not add salt to your water to make it soft, so less salt does not mean less soft.
Some people think that a water softener adds salt to your water to make your water soft and that if you can reduce the amount of salt that your water softener uses, you will reduce how soft your water will be.
This is simply not the case!
That is not how a water softener works and reducing your water softeners salt dosage will only mean that you will run into issues with hard water such as hard water stains and hardness build-up inside your hot water heater.
If a water softener does not get a sufficient dose of brine (salt water) from the salt tank, less of the water softening resin that is inside of the water softener will be regenerated.
This means that the water softening resin will not be able to remove as much hardness as normal.
The water softener should still produce soft water until the water softening resin that was regenerated is no longer able to remove any more hard minerals, but the water softener will have to regenerate more often to continuously provide you with softened water.
Using less salt only means that you will have soft water for a shorter period of time.
You can’t make water softening resin remove just some hardness.
Water softening resin will remove as many hard minerals as it can. As long as the water softening resin has a surface area in order to gather hard minerals and is capable of removing hard minerals from your water, it will produce softened water.
This means that your water will be soft until the water softener can no longer soften your water, and once the water softener resin has reached its maximum capacity, you will have hard water coming from your water softener.
Changing the hardness setting on your water softener will not give you water that is semi-soft for long.
It may appear that if you were to raise or lower the hardness setting on your water softener, you will be able to adjust how hard the water coming out of the water softener is, but that is not exactly what the hardness setting on your water softener means.
The hardness setting on your water softener tells the water softener how much hardness needs to be removed in one gallon or liter of water.
This lets the water softener system know how many gallons of water can be used before it will need to regenerate its water softening resin.
Basically, the hardness setting on a water softener programs the water softener to regenerate after a certain number of gallons of water have gone through the water softeners resin.
By setting the water hardness on a water softener, you are NOT setting how hard the water coming out of the water softener will be, you are just letting it know how many gallons of water that its water softening resin can soften.
The hardness setting does not tell the water softener how hard the water coming out of the water should be. It just tells the water softener when it will need to regenerate in order to continue to provide softened water.
Is there any way to add hardness back into my softened water?
There are a few types of water softeners that have a valve that is there to blend the softened water coming out of the water softener with the untreated water that has not yet gone through the water softener in order to add some hardness to your water.
Unfortunately, these bleeder valves often create more hardness than desired, and the amount of water hardness often fluctuates, so even on water softeners that may have this function, it does not often provide the semi-hard water that it is intended for.
Mixing a small amount of your unsoftened water with your softened water can give you water with just some hardness in it but if you have iron in your water, it will also give you water with iron in it.
Generally, trying to mix untreated water with softened water is not done because it is so hard to regulate the mix. Often the two water supplies will not mix equally and the percentage of the mix will fluctuate.
Getting used to softened water may take a little time, but once you become accustomed to it, you will find that properly softened water is a pleasure to have and there is no need to have any hardness in your water.
