The main things we are concerned about are<\/p>\n
- \n
- hard water, which is very hard on shower surfaces and fixtures<\/li>\n
- the bad taste<\/li>\n
- chlorine and other remnants of the treatment process (chloramines)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Here is what we are thinking for a treatment system.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/buildingfromscratch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/water_treatment-1-1024x742.png\")
<\/p>\nThe charcoal filter<\/span> removes the chlorine and other byproducts<\/p>\n
The water softener<\/span> removes the minerals which is better for the pipes, fixtures, and shower surfaces.\u00a0 This week I finally understood how water softeners work, and it is interesting.<\/p>\n
A water softener, also called an ion exchange system, has two main parts<\/p>\n
- \n
- A bed of resin beads<\/li>\n
- A salt tank \/ reservoir for recharging the system<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
The salt brine in the recharge tank is flushed through the resin beads.\u00a0 The sodium ions cling to the resin beads.\u00a0 When water flows through the resin bed, the calcium and other minerals are exchanged on the resin beads for the sodium ions.\u00a0 So, the resin beads capture the minerals and free the sodium.\u00a0 Every once in a while, the recharge brine is flushed through the resin bed which reverses this process; the minerals are removed from the resin beads and replaced again with sodium ions, and the resulting mineral (and sodium) rich brine is flushed down the sewer.<\/p>\n
There are two main implications from this process<\/p>\n
- \n
- You are putting sodium into your water.\u00a0\u00a0 It isn’t a good idea to drink sodium rich water or water plants with it.<\/li>\n
- Flushing a high sodium brine down the sewer is very hard on the municipal water system.\u00a0 It makes it harder to treat and any resulting recovered grey water is very salty, making it bad for plants.\u00a0 Many cities are banning water softeners.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
Some will tell you that there isn’t much sodium in the water, and it is fine to drink it and water plants, but it all depends on your water hardness.\u00a0 The harder your water, the more sodium you will use and therefore add to your water.<\/p>\n
Another salt<\/a> that works almost as well as sodium chloride is potassium chloride.\u00a0 Unlike sodium, potassium is actually good for you and beneficial for plants. However, potassium salt is about 4 times as expensive right now<\/a>, and it doesn’t work quite as well as sodium salt.\u00a0 It also isn’t bad for the municipal water system.<\/p>\n
Despite the higher cost, we are going to use potassium as it is the right thing to do.<\/p>\n
The reverse osmosis<\/span> unit will filter for drinking water, mostly to improve the flavor.\u00a0 One drawback of reverse osmosis is that, by removing all the minerals from the water (which increase the PH), it makes the water more acidic.\u00a0 Acidic water will eat away at copper pipes.\u00a0 There are two ways around this problem.<\/p>\n
- \n
- Use plastic pipes<\/li>\n
- Re-mineralize the water<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
We are still deciding whether to use plastic pipes or not.\u00a0 From what we know, plastic pipes (PEX) carry a slightly higher risk of failure.<\/p>\n
Re-mineralization is the process of adding a very small amount of minerals back to the water, mostly calcium, which makes the water more alkaline.<\/p>\n
Another consideration is the trend of alkaline water<\/a>.\u00a0 By removing the hardness from our drinking water, we are making it less alkaline.<\/p>\n
We are still deciding on all this.\u00a0 We may end up plumbing the house to accommodate the system above, but not putting it in initially.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We met with 4 different water treatment companies this week. In Santa Barbara, most of our water comes from the Santa Ynez Valley watershed, which feeds Cachuma Lake.\u00a0 There is almost no farming or industrial activity in the water shed, so our water is reasonably pure.\u00a0 However, it tends to go through a lot ofRead more about Water treatment<\/span>[…]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":782,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-plumbing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/buildingfromscratch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/buildingfromscratch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/buildingfromscratch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/buildingfromscratch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/buildingfromscratch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=778"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/buildingfromscratch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":784,"href":"http:\/\/buildingfromscratch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778\/revisions\/784"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/buildingfromscratch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/buildingfromscratch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/buildingfromscratch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/buildingfromscratch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}