How much water softener is better to opt for?

This review is devoted to the topic of a perfect water softener. Which one to choose, will you ask? Actually, there are many options and everyone will select the one that is suitable for his/her purposes. But nevertheless it is a highlight that with every year more and more people are simply tired of cleaning the toilets, faucets, taps and other places, which constantly have a contact with hard water. But what can we do? It is just not in our hands and we can’t control it. Let’s have a look at the following situation as an example a washing machine – each and every time we turn it on, it reacts with hard water as we can’t fill it with distilled one. Therefore, we have no choice but to use different softeners to help our washing machines, and other equipment and surfaces.

I do perfectly understand and feel your problem as only 2 years ago I experienced it myself. The most significant points of choosing the right softener consists of 2 factors:

you should have a clear idea, how hard is your water?

how much water does your household use?

Knowing only these two points, one can fight the problem forever and ever. If you have no idea/clue how to check or measure it, I’m always at your service. And that’s actually my only intention. Therefore let’s move on further and find out how to measure how hard the water is.

Water hardness

The water hardness depends on one point only – your pipes. If they are old enough and the water system too, it is not the best sign. As it means that inside of them, a lot of bad elements have accumulated and of course, they trap into your faucet and taps. That’s why don’t spend your time thinking that this problem hides somewhere else as well as don’t think that your water is hard because of lime-scales on the surfaces. The major problem is always in pipes.

Let’s consider several ways of measuring the water hardness in your particular case. The first and foremost thing you can undertake is to call to a local laboratory and ask them to take samples of the water and test it. But this way is a bit complicated in terms of money, as it is a little expensive and secondly it takes long time.

Yet, there is a quick and simple method to check it and moreover you can do it by yourself – buy a water hardness testing kit. It is absolutely free and you can get to know the result extremely fast.

No sooner than you have done it, you will see the result, either good or bad, hopefully good. Be attentive, the hardness of water is measured in grains – gpg – this is an abbreviation (grains per gallon). The more grains you see, the harder the water is. But how many grains is fine, average or really hard?

To answer this question, look at the chart/table I have included below. Thanks to it, I hope, you well understand everything.

How much water does your household use?

The factor we mentioned, to find the best softener, was about the amount of water your household uses. Unfortunately, we can’t know for sure, how much water we use. Because every day it might be different. Also depends on if you live alone or with a family etc. But just to give an example: on average the person uses about 70-90 gallons of water a day. Starting out from this, you can count an approximate figure.

When you know the answer, just multiply it by the number of family members, or people living in your house.

For instance, you have 4 people in your household and each of them uses 70 gallons of water per day, it makes 4×70=280 gallons of water a day.

The size

Now you are smart)) (you have measured the level of water hardness and amount of water you use) and therefore we can move on even further. We can now calculate the size of water softener you will need to use.

And here we have to deal with numbers again, so get your calculators). We consider your own example and as we said above, you use 280 gallons of water a day and kit showed you 6 grains.

280 multiply 6=1680 grains. Remember this number, it is kind of special. Because that’s exactly how much your water softener should get in order to improve the condition and level of the water in pipes etc.

Conclusions

The water softener comes in different sizes or the so-called capacities. How to understand, how much do you exactly need? As we have calculated everything and know all the figures and numbers we may conclude that if we use the water softener about 20 days a month, we will need a 30,000-grain capacity. The softener will help you a lot to improve the situation with the surfaces, but you shouldn’t forget to regenerate the system with salt. But how often should you do that?