I've been looking at getting a water softener and most of them use salt to replace the calcium with sodium. I also came across some which just pass a magnetic field around the pipes such as this one:
LN
Yes.
The salt in a softener is used to wash the resin bed that the softener contains - this resin attracts calcium from the water but requires flushing with the salt periodically to keep working. A (very) small amount of sodium/salt is passed thru to the water so you may want to consider installing a hard water tap in the circuit before the softener as increased levels of sodium may be harmful to infants or those sensitive to raised salt levels. We've had one for years and wouldn't be without it now. Go for it, you'll notice the difference immediately!
Steve
PS That's not a softener, it doesn't soften the water. Softeners require salt. That is a 'water conditioner', it doesn't remove any of the compounds that cause hardness (calcium and magnesium compounds) from the water. The claimed effects are, at best, marginal and dubious.
At a previous address, the plumbers put one of those in ahead of the combination boiler. It did nothing to stop the heat exchanger furring up.
Colin Bignell
Such is the nature of ion exchange - the calcium ions in the water are exchanged for the sodium ones in the matrix. When full it needs flushing with saline to remove the calcium and replace the sodium ions.
None of this has anything to do with magnetic/electric water "conditioners".
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "lardyninja" saying something like:
Your scepticism does you credit. It is, indeed, a load of gnarled ancient shoe repairers.
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