Green Nac & Cascadian
The best duo to protect your family
SOFTENERS vs SALT FREE SOFTENERS
Arizona's hard water is the enemy. It ruins your skin, hair, clothes, your home's appliances and all of your plumbing. Studies have shown that people typically spend over $100,000 to remedy the destruction caused by hard water between 10-20 years of owning a home. All of this can be avoided with the right water purification. I have worked on projects with UofA and ASU testing water “purification” systems for the harsh Arizona water, we really only have two choices in water purification.
The best answer for clean and soft water is the Cascadian salt-free water softening system. Everything that is in our water has a positive charge to it. This means that it attracts itself to everything. It sticks to your skin, hair, clothes, your home's plumbing, appliances and most importantly, it attracts to other molecules. If a single piece of calcium or sediment was able to flow without bonding with anything else, it would be perfect. But because it is positively charged, they attract to each other and bond together. This bonding is what creates hardness, calcium, and sediment buildup on your plumbing fixtures and appliances and causes us to have to replace them all the time. It also damages your skin, hair and ruins your clothing.
The national average for hardness is 17 PPM, but Arizona suffers with 34–66 PPM. Cascadian destroys the molecular structure of the molecules, not allowing them to bond so that they pass freely without causing all this destruction. It feels like you’re bathing in rainwater because this process does not need to introduce salt, avoiding the slimy feeling you get with a conventional softener. It also has a “taste and odor busting” feature that eliminates chemicals creating tastes in the water. The third and most impressive feature is the introduction of phosphate. Phosphate lines your piping with a layer of protection, which prevents anything from sticking to the pipes, fixtures, and appliances. We add extra filtration by installing a pre-filter which traps all the garbage from the city and allows the Cascadian to do its job effectively.Maintenance is simple; you just have to replace the Cascadian cartridge and pre filter once a year. If you have a larger family that uses a lot of water or you would prefer the ultimate in water quality, then you can change the pre-filter every 6-9 months if desired.
You can purchase the filters online for both, and we leave wrenches so that you can do the maintenance yourself if you would like to save money on the yearly maintenance. If you would prefer not to worry about changing filters every year, just give us a call and we will tackle that for you.
Installation is even simpler than a salt softener. If you already have a softener loop, we can install the Cascadian & Green NAC directly into the pre plumbed loop and you are set. If not, we can create a loop in any home very easily because this system requires no electricity, no drain lines and we do not need to convert any existing hose bids to hard water. This water is perfect for your home as well as your landscaping or anything fed off of the hose bibs. Who or what does not love clean water!
The second option is the traditional water softener. It uses salt or potassium to soften the water. This means "total dissolved solids". A softener uses tiny beads "resin" with a negative electrostatic charge that attracts positively charged minerals - calcium and magnesium only. This means any harsh chemicals, biological - bacterias or sediment are allowed to pass freely into your home's plumbing to ruin your home, appliances, skin, hair, clothes, etc...
How does a softener work? Lets reminisce about those high school dances we may or may not have had the pleasure of attending. The girls are the resin & the boys are the hardness. They connect and dance together all day/night. That's a 1 to 1 reaction. Now we all know there's never enough girls at a party to dance with so the remaining boys who don't get a dancing partner usually end up being a nuisance and damaging things. A softener tries to catch all of the hardness it can but it can only do so much because there's never enough resin balls in the softener so a lot of hardness still gets past and goes into your plumbing. So how does the softener keep getting used day and day again if the resin is being used up? That's the salt's job. It's the police and they come at 1-2am in the morning to break up the party. I'm sure you've been woken up from the softener rejuvenating early in the morning, pipes banging around and the sound of water rushing down a drain. Softeners are typically set for the early morning to rejuvenate because they need about 45 minutes to an hour of time to rinse the hardness off the resin. That is A LOT of water wasting. The cops come and say hey, lets break it up. Girls go back in the tank ready for another day and the boys go down the drain. This party starts fresh every day but we waste a lot of water to do it and we send salt water down our city sewers so now the cities have to throw that water away because it is too costly to reclaim salt water. No reclaimed water for our lakes, parks, golf courses, etc.... Just higher water and sewer bills.
Softeners need to be tested with a TDS test kit. This test is only for softeners and it measures what hardness is removed from the water. It does not test for anything else and cannot be used to test any other water systems. Our water is super hard here in Arizona as mentioned above, and the cities typically combat it down to about 20 PPM give or take. You want to be between 0-1 PPM if using a softener. There’s a huge difference between the quality of softeners, so you really need to ensure you get the right one. The cheap ones on Amazon or at the big box stores like Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Sears are just that—cheap. They do half the job they should, meaning you’ll still have water scaling and calcium/sediment deposits on all of your plumbing. It will feel somewhat “soft” due to the salt, but it won’t be perfectly soft. They typically last about 5-7 years before they start to leak, and the resin will need to be changed out about every 5-7 years due to losing its ability to stay charged. Most of the softeners you find are just bottom-priced and basic-built so that people will purchase them.
The key to softening water with a salt softener is MORE resin. If you chose a cheap water softener, you get low quality resin that loses it's charge quickly so you get to change the softener more frequently. You also do not get soft water throughout the entire day because there's not enough resin to capture all of the hardness. Why do they sell these cheap softeners then you ask? That's because not everywhere is the water super hard so in other states, these cheap softeners may work alright. They just do not work correctly here in Arizona.
When it comes to building softeners, I do not skimp when I have softeners built. Our softeners can last 15+ years. We use better resin that collects more and lasts longer, full-port ball valve bypass valves so they don’t restrict water pressure, and they are not noisy in operation. We use the Clack digital head which monitors the amount of water you’re using and rejuvenates as needed so that you never run out of soft water. The other benefit to this is it does not rejuvenate every night wasting salt and water if it’s not needed.
IMPORTANT NOTE -
Many states like California, Colorado, and New Mexico have already banned softeners, and we will be behind them shortly. As of now, softeners are still allowed in Arizona. However, cities like Scottsdale, Carefree, Cave Creek, Rio Verde and Fountain Hills are currently working on banning softeners due to the environmental impact, water wasting/usage, and the salt and potassium gums up our city’s filtration system for reclaiming the water to use in other applications. It is like trying to clean the ocean water with all the salt to be able to reuse it, which is extremely expensive so it's not done and the water gets wasted. They are being banned because they waste 45 minutes to an hour's worth of water during rejuvenation. Of course, the fees for that get sent to us, the end-user.
Our softeners are designed to be more environmentally friendly, but not 100% environmentally friendly.A water softener needs to be sized properly so we need to confirm the number of people in the home so we can add the right amount of resin. We also need a dedicated softener loop. If your home has one, that's great! If your home doesn’t have a loop, we can definitely take care of you. Just give us a call! It will just be an additional cost once we determine where we can put it and what size plumbing we need to run. We will also need to run a drain line, and you will need an electrician to put in an outlet if there isn’t one close by where we can create a loop.
We also need to make sure all of your water lines to the hose bibs are converted back to hard water. You cannot run salt water to your irrigation, it will kill your grass, trees and plants. Plus it's not good for animals or pools as well. If you have health conditions, you may also want to make sure the water lines to the fridge and the kitchen faucet are converted to hard water as well. You do not want salt introduced in your drinking and cooking water. Hopefully this helps you understand the importance of water purification. If you have any questions, please let me know and we will be glad to help you. Which system would make better sense for you and your family?
