One of the most common questions that we hear about water softeners is whether we should drink the water. It’s a great question and one of the first things that I wanted to know when we started.
A water softeners purpose is to remove the hardness minerals from water. Hardness minerals cause:
- Bathtub ring and film on shower tiles
- Excess soap usage in bathing, laundry, dishes
- Laundry to wear out faster
- Scaling in your water appliances, reducing life
- And a lot of other problems that we have covered in an earlier post
But really, if you think about it – this is really the “Working” water in your home. A Water Softener is designed to improve the working water in you home.
So now I better get to the question.
The way that a water softener works is called “ion exchange” but really that just means that it trades the hardness minerals for the sodium in your water. The amount of sodium that a water softener will add to your water depends on the hardness, but normally here it works out to about 80 milligrams of sodium in a liter of water. A single slice of bread is 125 – 150 milligrams.
So really, if you are not on a sodium restricted diet, the answer is normally yes. Here’s some information from the Mayo Clinic.
What can you do if you have a water softener and don’t want to drink the water?
- If the plumbing lines are accessible, you can bypass a tap for your drinking water
- You can use potassium chloride to recharge your water softener. A couple of brands are Nature’s Own or Softtouch. This product is about 5 times the price of salt, but then you will be getting potassium instead of sodium.
- You can drink bottled water.
- Many people are deciding that they want better drinking water. Reverse osmosis systems can provide the best drinking water and remove the sodium.
