How To Choose A Home Water Softener ?
Everyone wonder how water softener works? Mineral loaded hard water goes in but soft, clean water comes out. So how do water softeners work and help us avoid spotted dishes, appliances and clogged water heaters?
For eliminating hardness, ion exchange process is considered best in which sodium ion replaces calcium and magnesium ions from the hardness causing minerals to produce a mineral that does not cause hardness and makes water potable.
A water softener has a resin tank which is made up of minute beads of sodium ions. When the water enters the resin tank, the sodium ions swap the places with calcium and magnesium ions. Water softener control valve transfers the collected magnesium and calcium ions into a brine tank, a part of water softener. The brine tank drains out the magnesium and calcium ions present in the resin tank and replaces them with sodium ions and provides you soft water.
There are two types of home water softeners available- Automatic softeners and Demand initiated regeneration (DIR). Automatic softeners come with a timer that controls the ion regeneration process, usually at night. Demand initiated regeneration runs on autopilot mode, everything in this is pre planned and the softener does what it has to do depending on the usage of water.
Softeners using other technology than ion exchange are also present in market like one using charcoal filters but all such softeners are more expensive and not so effective as usual softeners.
It is very essential for every homeowner to choose a water softener system that is best suited to his requirements. You need to realize your requirements and match them with the softeners available in the market.
Select a water softener that can meet the needs of your family. Let us suppose there are 3 members in your family then by a rough estimate you can say that 240 gallons of water will be used in a day by these 3 members. One gallon of water generally contains 10 grains of hardness that means your softener needs to remove 2400 grains of hardness everyday. Therefore, you need to take a softener that can regenerate ions with such speed.
By now you must have got a good idea of a softener, so go today only and buy a softener from a well known and reliable store. Your softener should have a government approval seal and also check that softener should be easy to clean and handle.