Certainly one of life's "little secrets" is having good quality water available in your home. We are blessed here in Central Ohio. Most of our municipal water supply comes for local reservoirs. These usually provide very serviceable water directly into your home. Now if you live in some of the outer lying areas of Central Ohio your water may be quite a bit harder. Never the less it is usually very usable directly out of the tap. However if our water was just a little harder most of us would certainly have at least a water softener in our home, similar to the Dayton OH market. What a lot of us don't realize, we still actually struggle with hard water everyday just not to the point we HAVE to fix it. However that doesn't mean we shouldn't fix it. Soft water definitely improves our quality of life.

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Soft water has many benefits

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Healthier skin: Because soft water contains fewer minerals, your skin picks up and holds moisture easier. While bathing or showering in hard water can have an adverse effect on your skin. The minerals in hard water remove the skin’s natural oils, which can dry out your skin and, for some, result in itchy, irritated skin.

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Healthier hair:  Soft water can help balance your hair’s pH level, while hard water can cause your hair to feel dry, brittle, and frizzy. It can also dull your hair color.

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Brighter clothes: If your home has hard water, you're washing clothes in minerals that leave deposits. Over time, the minerals will cause the colors to fade. Some minerals can even cause stains or dingy whites. Soft water is the better option. In fact, many add salt to a load of colors to prevent bleeding, which isn't necessary for a soft water system and the use of sodium exchange. 

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Cleaner clothes: Soft water dissolves into clothes easier, cleaning the clothes more effectively. With hard water, your clothes are being washed in minerals that leave deposits in the fabric. Over time, the minerals will cause the colors to fade and whites to become dingy. Because soft water dissolves detergent more effectively, you can use less detergent and may not need fabric softeners at all. 

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Less time cleaning, especially the bathroom:  You know how time-consuming cleaning can be. You are constantly re-washing dishes and laundry. You may spend hours a week scrubbing chalky lime and soap scum off the walls of your showers, sinks, and faucets. Using a water softener not only prevent the negative effects of hard water, but soft water fully dissolves and penetrates soap, less insoluble soap scum or curd collects in your bathroom. Saving the time you spend cleaning on a regular basis.

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Saves money: Soft water is much easier on any appliance that uses water, such as refrigerators, dishwashers, coffee makers, irons, other water filtration systems such as under sink or refrigerator filters and certainly water heaters. There is little need to flush a standard tank and if you have a tankless system you can go twice as long between service visits to remove scale.  

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Any Drawbacks To Soft Water?

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If you are on a low sodium diet, you may have reservations about drinking soft water due to the process of sodium exchange. The amount of sodium added to your water is entirely dependent on the hardness level of your water. The harder the water, the more sodium that is exchanged. Even then, it does not add up to a significant amount. In a glass of soft water, there is on average 12.5 mg of sodium. To help you put that into perspective, a single slice of whole wheat bread has 211 mg of sodium.

Others question the need to remove calcium and magnesium from the water if they are beneficial to your health. But the amount of these minerals ingested through hard water is insignificant compared with the amount of time and money spent combating their negative effects on your home. Both minerals are common in everyday supplements and in the leafy greens suggested for most healthy diets anyway.

Also worth noting our systems can be installed or changed over to potassium chloride for instances where a no sodium diet is desired. In addition a reverse osmosis drinking water system will remove any sodium left in the water intended for drinking. Even without additional filtration no salt taste will be left in the water. If you have any softener system that produces water with a salt taste, get it repaired or replaced right away. It is not working correctly if any taste is evident at all. 

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