Urgent advice needed re soft water please

We are about to have a water softener installed as we live in an extremely hard water area. The outdoor taps will be affected by this. Will we be able to water pots/garden with said softened water?

 

I'm about to have a water softener fitted, the outside taps will not be supplied via the softener.
The softened water may well have too high a salt level for your plants, and it would also mean that you use up more salt in the softener.
It should be easy to fit the softener so that it doesn't supply softened water to the outside taps.

 

Softened water tastes really salty if you get some in your mouth whilst your having a shower if a softner is fitted. Our daughter lives in Staines and she has one.
There's always a scum on the surface of a cup of tea as it's made with unsoftened water. In my youth I lived in Surrey, so you thought this was normal!
Here in the North-west the water is very soft with a neutral ph. If you had an old type car battery, there is no need for distilled water, you could use the tap water to top up the cells.

 

Hi Granny Rose,

Is it a full blown water softening unit with the salt or the electronic clip on one without ?

 

Probably not good for the plants. But may depend on the type of softener - whether reverse-osmosis, or something else. My DW gets dreadfully itchy skin if she bathes in water that has been softened by reverse-osmosis - so I think there must be some imbalance to normal; there is some other process (the name escapes me, but I think it may involve Magnesium) which apparently doesn't give creepy-crawly skin ... but probably is equally unacceptable to plants!

We lived in a house, a while back, that had a water softener and that has a specific tap in the kitchen, fed from the mains bypassing the water softener, which was labelled "drinking water" and we were cautioned to avoid drinking from other taps. Dunno if this applies to your situation, so only mention it "in case".

 

Have a read of this,

http://www.allwaterpurification.com/electronic-water-softener.html

No danger to your health or your plants, cheap to run & costs about $170.

Not sure, but I think the salt unit is about £400.

 

"Electronic water softeners can either use the electric power supply or they may depend on the current produced by electrolysis."

I get the first bit - "plug it in", but is it just me, or does that second bit read wrongly?

 

I'm a bit confused, why are things so difficult.

I get chalk in the kettle but I always have, cant see the problem, and I would definitely not put salt into the water to soften it.

 

Our daughter had the water softner installed as one of her kids developed a form of eczema, which the doctor put down to the hard water.
It controls it but it doesn't completely clear the problem. However a week staying up here with us and it goes. Personally I think it might be partly due to the fuel vapour in the atmosphere as where they live in Staines is immediately under the flightpath for Heathrow.

 

The usual arrangement for salt water water softners is to have a single U shaped swivel pipe on the side of the kitchen sink with it's own tap for un-treated water. The supply to this needs to be connected to the outside tap if you don't want salty water going on your plants.

 

Sounds like an Ion exchange resin being used to remove the hardness from the water - and the salt is used to "flush" it periodically in a reverse-process.. I suppose some of the salt stays in the resin and is then dissolved into the "purified" water?

Our dishwasher takes salt - I guess it uses the same sort of mechanism

 

Here in the North-west, there's no need for salt in our dishwasher. Salt is very corrosive, koi-keepers sometimes add this to their installations as a "tonic" and infection preventative, but the consensus of opinion is that it makes the enthusiast "feel better" rather than have any preventative or remedial effects and it can eventually ruin the pumps. Dunno what the salt in a water softened home system does to the insides of any dishy which isn't made of high quality stainless steel. Same with washing machines.

 

It's a salt block one, thanks