No-salt water softener

It seems to be a plumbed-in equivalent of a Brita filter, I use the latter for the coffee machine and to make ice cubes, but it will only reduce, not eliminate, limescale. Therefore it may not have the expected benefits for a whole-house installation.

We had a phosphate balls water treatment installed on the mains side of our boiler.

As far as I know it used food grade phosphates which slowly dissolved; you had to change the balls in the container every few years.

The hot water tap didn't seem to fur up.

Not as effective as a whole house water softener as far as I can recall, but then we only used it on the hot to prevent the combi boiler furring up.

Cheers

Dave R

Many thanks to everyone for the replies and links. Very helpful and indeed illuminating: I've decided to embrace the traditional technology.

I see that Monarch, makers of that no-salt unit, also have a conventional machine in their catalogue: a two-chamber block-salt model which seems very similar to the Kinetico softener I had at a previous house. The most obvious difference is that the Monarch is about half the price. Searching for reviews and opinions online I have so far failed to turn up a single one, which might or might not be significant.

I've now installed the Monarch block-salt model. Build quality is certainly not as high-end as the Kinetico I used to have, but in every other respect the Monarch seems to be fine. Thanks to everyone for the thoughts and advice.