How do water softener systems work? Are they magic? Adding salt gets rid of other minerals. . . HOW? I’ve never understood this. I’m 54, male.
In: Chemistry
Salt is actually two types of atoms bound together, and they have a loose bond – once salt gets into water, it dissolves. This means the atoms float around by themselves. However, some other molecules can form from the leftovers, molecules which do not have a loose bond. These include the other minerals, which bind with parts of the dissolved salt, and drop to the bottom as solid materials, which are easily filtered out.
Now, a water softener uses some other smart tricks to remove the salt, but this is the basic version – salt dissolves, other materials form from the leftovers. We can use the same principle to clean water of lots of other unwanted things, and I recall a science project we had in high school where we went to a sewage plant and collected some, well, sewage water, and had to clean it using, basically, filtering and this method. My group’s water ended up crystal clear – but quite toxic, as we hadn’t figured out how to get the pH value down to normal levels.
The water softener is full of resin beads that like to grab onto the minerals that make water “hard.”
However, they eventually can’t hold any more minerals and need to be cleaned, so the water softener runs a salt water solution through the beads to rinse them off.
Then, the system is ready to use again.
We drink nothing but water in our home, and didn’t care for the slightly salty taste, so we switched to potassium chloride instead of salt. It is FAR more expensive, but worth it because of all the water we drink. People are always commenting on how good our water tastes when they come over.
Apologize my ignorance but what is hard water?
Used to work for a company that sold water softeners. One thing I didn’t see mentioned below is a lot of people complain *after* putting in a water softener that they don’t feel the water gets them ‘clean’ after a shower.
The reason apparently is all those dissolved minerals in the hard water act as a mild exfoliant, and without them, people feel like their skin is not being scrubbed.
And it is those tiny dissolved minerals are the real reason for getting a softener, IMHO. We have an ice maker in the fridge, a built-in coffee machine and a dishwasher. Hard water attacks all the seals in those devices, and over times, erodes them, causing leaks and other malfunctions.
How long do the beads work? Do they have to be replaced periodically?
The resin beads inside do the filtering . The salt bath is what cleans the beads off of mineral deposits every 24 hours or so.
The salt doesn’t do the actual softening. It’s what revitalizes the beads.
Water filtration systems get rid of minerals, sediment, and other unwanted contaminates with various filtering strategies.
Then, separate or in-built, water softer systems will condition the water, such as using salts to adjust the water’s ‘hardness’ and re-adding healthy drinking water minerals.
Might be worth mentioning that there are chemicals that function in a similar way called chelating agents.
They’re usually compounds, ligands with slightly negative active groups that tend to bind to positively charged ions responsible for water hardness like calcium ions. They’re used in industrial uses, as medical treatments. Hell, even haemoglobin the stuff that carries oxygen around the body functions as a chelating agent – strongly binding to Fe2+ ions which in turn acts as a reversible binding agent of oxygen for you know, helping your body functions properly.
In ELI5 terms, they’re like little hooks or claws, many are shaped like the claw in a claw machine but instead of grabbing stuffed toys they grab onto heavy metal ions.
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