About Water Softener Recharging

Video Transcript

"As far as recharging a water softener, first let me talk a little bit about what a water softener is and what it does. It's a system that takes some of the hard minerals out of your water supply. Depending on where your home is located you may be on a well system, you may be on city water, but there's always some hard minerals such as lime or calcium that will build up in the water system. You've seen it in your sink, you've seen staining and marks from that. And there's certain appliances that they always recommend you use distilled water, I'm sure you've seen that with some of your home appliances. Irons especially, steam irons is a good example of that. So you need to have a soft water source. If you have a water softener in your home then you don't need to use distilled water to put in your steam iron for example and you'll notice that when you suds up in the shower, water softener gives you a lot more suds with your soap. Those are the most notable things about soft water versus hard water. Now in recharging a system, essentially what you're doing in water softening is leeching out the hard minerals by use of salination, sort of by introducing a salt making almost a brine solution to leech those minerals out of the water. So as a certain amount of water flows through the system, you need to recharge the salt source and in some systems it's simple as a block of salt. And some systems are setup that you just automatically change the salination system weekly and some of them are computerized to tell you after a certain amount of water has passed through the system. So essentially recharging a home water softening system is no more than changing out the block of salt or make sure as you do work on your home water softening system that you are following the manufacturer's specifications to the letter."