My parents got a water softener installed in their house a couple years back. Every time I go visit and shower there I feel slimy from the water. I hate it. They love it, good for them. But I’ve always wondered what causes that slimy feeling from the soft water. My limited understanding is that hard water contains more minerals than soft water. Is that accurate? How does that cause the slimy feeling of soft water? I’d love to understand the science behind it. Thanks!
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A water softener tank is full of tiny polymer beads called “zeolite.” They are about the consistency of medium-fine sand. *(Speaking from experience, if you see what looks like sand coming out of your faucet, there’s a problem with your softener: one of the very fine screens used to keep the beads in the tank has been perforated.)*
When you use water, it flows through the bed of zeolite, and ions of calcium and magnesium, present in the hard water, are replaced with sodium ions.
Eventually, the zeolite beads are depleted of sodium ions, so the water softener must be “regenerated.” It’s kind of like a washing machine cycle where the beads are first reverse rinsed to get rid of any particles that came in the water line, then in a slow process brine is pulled from an adjacent tank where there is a mixture of salt pellets and water. The brine flows very slowly through the bead bed, removing hard water ions and replacing them with sodium ions, and to the drain. Once the brine cycle is done (1-2 hours), the beads are once again rinsed to get rid of any brine in the tank. Then, the automatic valve returns to normal and you get soft water in your house again.
Some softener companies like Culligan take your bead tank on their truck back to a central location where the brine rinse takes place. This allows them to have more control than you would on the brine and stuff, reducing the amount of salt water that is discharged into the ground or the sewer system. As one might imagine, salt water never really goes away, unless you happen to live in a place where your sewer plant discharges its treated water into the ocean, so water softeners are not the best thing for local water supplies. Many inland water agencies in southern California now discourage or prohibit the use of softeners, even though our water is relatively hard in some areas.
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