Steps For Using Water Softener In Your Home
One of the simplest long-term things you can do to improve your drinking and cooking water is to install a salt softener system to filter minerals out of the water. Here are some steps that you'll go through to set up one of these systems.
Measure Your Water's Hardness
The first thing to do is test your water supply to determine its hardness. You can get estimates from your municipal supply, or use a water softening contractor to do testing in your home. From this information, you can see the value of adding a softener to your water and the strength that the softener needs to be. It's often good to get formal testing to get the most accurate numbers. While your municipal numbers can estimate the quality of the water from their source, there are numerous factors that can change water hardness along the way to your taps, such as old or damaged piping that leaks minerals into the water.
Choose a Strength
Your water test should return back a number of your water's grains of hardness. Take this number and multiply it by the volume of water your family uses on a daily basis. A good estimate is to use 80 liters per day per person in these calculations. The final number tells you how may grains of hardness the water softener needs to remove; each water softener should have strength numbers that correspond its mineral removal capability.
Install Piping
Before you can begin to apply water softener, you will need to install piping to connect the water softener to your existing water supply. There are numerous tutorials for how to do this online, and all you would need is some NPT connectors from your local hardware store. But if you don't feel comfortable installing it yourself, then a water softening contractor would be happy to do it for you.
Maintain Salt Levels
Once you have the correct plumbing in place, the biggest maintenance you'll have to do is to keep the salt levels at a reasonable level. You can get softener salt delivery so that you always have enough supplies on hand, and then set a routine for how often you should refill the salt.
In short, salt softener systems do take a little bit of time to set up, but they can be very valuable for improving the taste and quality of your drinking and cooking water. Contact a business that offers water softener salt delivery for more information.