OT Water softeners

Does anyone use the new softeners that use no salt? They use a process called chelation. My wife thinks we should get one but nobody in this area has one. Check it out at www.nuvoH2O.com thanks.

As I recall the water is somehow only held mineral free for a very short period of time. And because of this will mineralize pipes fixtures and everything else after this brief softening.

Unlike salt demineralization that actual takes the minerals away in the rinsed salt brine.

Save your money !! Water is hard because it contains disolved calcium and magnesiun refered to in the industry as ions. There is no filter available to take them out because they are disolved. A water softener uses a process called ion exchange. In the softener is a mineral known as zeolite. It attracts the calcium and magnesiun ions and you have soft water. As you use yoursoft water you have to regenerate the softener. This is done with salt. The salt removes the calcium and magnesium ions from the zeolite and replaces them with sodium ions, hence the term "exchange". The remainder of the sodium with the calcium and magnesium is washed down the drain. Depending on hardness which can be measured with a test, a normal regeneration will use from 4 to 12 pounds of salt and will need to be done once or twice a week. If your pipes have a brown scale in them, that's not hardness, it's iron and needs to be removed with another machine that uses chlorine, greensand filter media and is regenerated with potassiun pemanganate. It is not recomended that you drink softened water. The harder the water was, the more laxitive it becomes. It also tastes flat.

OK, I checked out their website. It's interesting, but I'm not convinced. It looks better than a lot of the other snake oil hard water gadgets (like the magnets you put around your pipes), but I don't see why it would be any better than a conventional water softener. A regular water softener swaps the calcium, iron and magnesium ions for sodium ions. Now sodium isn't exactly good for you, but if you add a reverse osmosis unit downstream of the softener for drinking water you end up with distilled water. Can't get any purer than that.

This "chelation" unit adds some chemical to the water that bonds to the hard water ions to make them soluble. Do we know for sure that the resulting compounds are any safer than sodium? When I wash my car with soft water I have no problem with water spots. Do you get the same results with chelation?

The other thing is cost. My demand water softener and RO system was not cheap to install. I did the work myself and still spent close to a grand. But now it's nearly maintenance-free; I go through 80 lbs of Dura-Cube Red-Out salt every two months, which works out to six bucks a month. The nuvoH2O system for a typical house costs about seven hundred bucks, which is comparable to what you'd pay for a decent water softener, less installation. But the cartridges cost 70 bucks apiece and have to be replaced every six months. So that's ten bucks a month, which makes it quite a bit more expensive than salt.

The only real advantage to this unit that I can see is you don't have to lug heavy bags of salt down to your basement. You have to weigh that against the fact that you can buy salt anywhere, but if this company goes under, your very expensive water treatment device is useless without its proprietary cartridges.

This actually appears to be a legitimate solution to all the hassles you have with a salt water softener.

The chelative process is chemically documented, and it's not a temporary reaction - it's a long term ionic bond.

This system uses citric acid instead of salt, so there are no negative dietary effects - no laxative effect like someone just mentioned, no high blood pressure issues due to increased salt intake, etc. Citric acid is in lemonade and orange juice, and it looks like this product is FDA approved.