Water Softener?

[Mick-the-Miller]

I have a Water Softener installed in the cupboard below my Kitchen sink, there's quite a lot of complicated piping in the cupboard the upshot of which is to deliver water straight from the main to the kitchen sink and to deliver water to the rest of the house which has passed through the Water Softener.

I did talk to the Plumber who installed it and it all made sense to me at the time but I cannot remember why the water to the kitchen sink is unsoftened.

My question is - are you not recommended to drink water that has been 'softened'? If not, why not?

TIA

[bhg481]

Some people think there is too much salt in the water from a softener, so you shouldn't drink it; in reality the amount of salt is negligible. It seems pointless to me to have a water softener and then use hard water to fill your kettle and scale it up. We've had a softener for 40 years now and don't have any hard water inside the house, just an outside tap in case we need to water the garden (and nowadays we use a water butt instead).

[Mick-the-Miller]

I apologise for being lazy but I did a search on Answerbank about water softeners and I think I understand what happens inside the box.

I think the Softener uses Salt (sodium chloride) to convert Calcium Carbonate (ie limescale) in the mains water to Sodium Carbonate (I'm not sure what this is known as) and that it is thought that you shouldn't take in too much Sodium - but the concensus is that it's not a big deal as you'd have to drink an awful lot of it before it did you any harm.

I think that's it as I understand it - please correct me if I've got it wrong.

[bhg481]

You are essentially correct mick.
The softener contains a resin which removes soluble calcium salts from the water, the cause of the hardness. After a while the resin no longer works, as all the sodium in it has been used. At this point you run salt solution BACKWARDS through it, which regenerates the resin ie, replaces the calcium ions it has removed from the hard water with sodium ions from the salt. A quick flush to remove excess salt and off you go again.

[woofgang]

Artificially softened water is not recommended for babies and young children or (IIRC) people who have certain physical problems, ?kidney disease, so its usual to leave one mains tap dispensing unsoftened water. I have got a Brita mixer tap that has a third option to dispense filtered water which runs through a replaceable cartridge. This filters out hardness among other things, improves the taste for drinking and keeps the kettle scale free.