You notice that your water softener is making some noise early in the morning, but most of the time it is just sitting there quietly. You have never heard it make a sound during the day but you still have soft water during the day.
As water flows through a water softener, hard minerals contained in the water collect on the water softener resin. Because the resin can only hold a finite amount of hard minerals, a water softener needs to regenerate (clean) the resin in order for it to be able to remove more hard minerals.
If you have been wondering why you have to keep adding salt to your water softeners brine tank, or perhaps how your water softener continues to soften your water when it isn’t making a sound, let me shed some light on why your water softener has to regenerate.
A water softener needs to remove hard minerals from your water over and over again.
Although water will continue to flow through a water softener even if it does not regenerate at all, the water softener resin contained inside of a water softener will eventually become covered with hard minerals to the point where it can no longer remove any more hard minerals from your water.
You can think of water softener resin as looking a little bit like a golf ball. It is round with many small areas in which hard minerals can nestle and be held in place until the water softener regenerates them and clears the hard minerals off of them.
A water softener needs to do this before the resin becomes overwhelmed with hard minerals, and can no longer hold any more. Once the water softener has regenerated the resin, it will then have more available space to collect more hard minerals.
Why don’t water softeners regenerate every day?
In some cases, a water softener may have to regenerate every day but a properly sized water softener should only have to regenerate about once or twice a week.
It all depends on how much hardness that you have in your water, any iron that is in your water and the amount of water that you use in your home.
When a water softener is programmed correctly, it will only allow a predetermined amount of water to flow through its resin before it will regenerate.
This pre-programmed amount of water tells the water softener that it has removed as its maximum capacity of hard minerals and now needs to regenerate its water softener resin.
More on how often your water softener regenerates:
Does My Water Softener Regenerate Every Day?
Why Does My Water Softener Regenerate Every Day?
Even a large water softener can only soften a limited amount of water and will need to regenerate.
Getting a larger sized water softener does not necessarily mean that it needs to regenerate less often, and it certainly does not mean that it will use less salt than a smaller water softener.
If you think of a water softener a little bit like it is a big sponge that absorbs hardness from your water, and the water softener regeneration process is like the ringing out of that big sponge.
No matter what size the sponge is, it can only absorb so much hardness from your water before it will need to be rung out so it can absorb more hardness. The larger the sponge, the more hardness it will hold but it will take more effort to ring it out than a smaller sponge.
Also, a large water softener with more water softener resin in it will need more salt, water, and overall effort to regenerate the water softener resin.
The hard minerals that have been removed from your water have to go somewhere!
Probably the most important reason that a water softener has to regenerate is that it has to get rid of the hard minerals that have built-up on its water softener resin. Not just clearing the hard minerals off of the resin, but actually getting rid of them.
That is what the drain line on your water softener is for. After the water softener uses the brine from the salt tank to remove the hard minerals from the water softener resin, it then rinses the hard minerals away to a drain.
If a water softener did not perform its regeneration process, the hard minerals would not get removed from the water softener resin and they would not get rinsed away to a drain.
What would happen if my water softener did not regenerate?
Water softener resin will collect hard minerals on its surface until there is no longer any room to collect any more hardness. At this point, your water will run through your water softener and come out of it with hard minerals still in it.
If a water softener does not regenerate, the water can change very quickly for most households.
For an average family of four that uses about 300 gallons of water per day that contains 10 grains of hardness per gallon, the water may go from 0 hardness to 10 hardness overnight if the water softener does not regenerate when it has reached its maximum capacity.
Simply put, when the water softener resin has collected all of the hard minerals that it is capable of holding, the water will go through your water softener without having the hard minerals removed from it.
Also, if you let your water softener run out of salt, the water softener resin will not get regenerated and therefore the water will not be softened when it comes out of the water softener.
