Water Softeners

If you have recently determined that you have hard water, you're probably looking for a water softener to correct this problem in your home. As a consumer, you may not know what kind or type of water softener you need. A formula has been developed to determine this based on your water hardness and the amount of water used in your household.

The first thing to determine for the formula is the hardness level of your water. While some homes may have only slightly hard water, others may be facing hard or very hard levels of water. You will need to determine your home's water hardness in grains per gallon. If your water testing kit provided your hardness figures using parts per million or milligrams per liters, divide the number it gave you by 17.1. This number will equal your hardness level in grains per gallon. For example, if your hardness level was 65, and you divide that by 17.1, you have a hardness level of 3.8.

Once you have determined the hardness level of your water you should figure out how much water your household uses. Each home is different in the amount of water they use. When selecting a water softener you need to ensure that you get one that can keep up with the demands of your household, particularly if you have a large family or use a lot of water. For this estimate you should determine the number of gallons used daily per person, keeping in mind that the average consumer uses around 80 gallons per day, unless they reside in hot climates, in which they use 100-120.

After you have figured out the average number of gallons used daily per person, multiply that number by the total number of people in your home. For example, if the average person in your home uses 80 gallons per day and you have 4 people living in your home, that's 320 total gallons used daily.

Now you need to determine how much water hardness you need removed from your home on a daily basis. To get this you multiply the total gallons by the level of hardness. For our example it would be 320 times 3.8, which would equal 1,216 grains of hardness that need to be removed from the water every day.

Water softeners should regenerate only once every two or three days, so to determine your minimum softener capacity you need for your household you should take the grains of hardness needing to be removed daily by either two or three, depending on how long you want your water softener to go before regenerating. In our example, if we have our water softener regenerate every three days, we multiply 1216 by 3, which gives us our final minimum softener capacity which is 3,648.

Be certain to take the final minimum softener capacity with you when shopping for a water softener. All softeners list their grain capacity, and this will help you pick a water softener that fits in your household and works best for you.