[Greenbuilding] Water Softener Filters

[RT]

On Thu, 29 Jan 2015 18:38:36 -0500, Antonioli Dan <solardan26 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Has anyone ever heard of water softeners using potassium chloride or  
> sodium chloride having negative health effects?
>
> I have an application where I installed one on a well and everyone but  
> one person thinks it’s great.

I'm afraid I don't recall whether it was mentioned if the house is
connected to municipal infrastructure or is on a well/private septic
system so I don't know if my comments will have any relevance to the query.

My home is in a rural area and all of the wells are drilled in rock which
is at or very near the surface, depths of the wells ranging from about 6
metres to 360 metres or more (~20 to 1200+ ft).

If one looks at the blast rock or rock cuts where roads have been built
here, iron oxide staining is usually evident.

That is to say, the water in this area is obviously very hard and has a
high iron content to boot.

I made a decision to NOT install a water softener nor an iron filter when
I built (about 30 years ago) simply because:

	(i) I didn't want my household to be subjected to drinking water with
	elevated salt content, potentially exposing them to heart & kidney health
           issues and

	(ii) I didn't think that it made sense to be polluting perfectly potable
    		well water with salt and then dumping that brine into the groundwater
system,
            contributing to compromised water quality and

	(iii) I didn't think that it made sense to unnecessarily consume extra
		energy and water to remove minerals that are essential/beneficial to  
health
              	-- the very same minerals that many people try to put back  
into their bodies by eating high iron/calcium foods or taking supplement  
tablets .

Shortly after I built, there was a housing "boom" in this area-- a result
of the hi-tech sector in its prime, Kanata being "Silicon Valley North"
back then, and there was a proliferation of "rural estate" subdivisions
built from cash-ins of lucrative stock options or cash-outs of small
nascent companies being sold to bigger fish etc.

Most of the "new" households were people who moved out here from the city,
and it seems they had the same expectations for their well water that they
experienced in the city so water softeners and iron filters were de
rigueur.

So there was a large number of homes in the same area all built within a
few years of each other.

Starting at about the 8 year mark, I started noticing that many households
were experiencing failures of their well equipment, usually starting with
the pressure tank and then followed by the well pump shortly thereafter. I
found it curious because I had lived in rural locales pretty much
all of my adult life and failures of well equipment that "new" was rare.

Then at about the 18- 20 year mark, many households were having to replace
their septic fields. Back when those septic fields were constructed it was
before the advent of peat filter systems so all the septic fields were of  
the
raised filter media type, necessary because of the shallow-to-non-existent
soil overburden in this area. Such systems were more expensive to build
initially and 20 years later, the replacement cost had almost doubled.

Even if the cost of replacing well equipment and repairing plumbing flood
damage every 8-10 years and replacing septic fields every 20 years isn't
problematic, not having running water for a day or more while well
equipment is replaced is a pretty big PITA. (I refuse to use bottled  
water. I think that it's ridiculous

All of the households that experienced premature failures of well
equipment and septic fields were homes where water softeners were
installed. In the rural communities where I had lived previously, the
households were family farms and water softeners were pretty much unheard
of, as were short-lived well equipment and septic systems.

My *guess* is that the extra demands placed on well equipment and septic
systems (ie higher volumes of water pumped and dumped due to backwashing
requirements) played a significant role in their premature demise.

But specifically in relation to KCl vs NaCl salt, we know that potassium
is highly desirable as a fertiliser. It's the third number on all  
store-bought fertiliser packaging.

So while dumping potassium into the groundwater system may not be as  
obviously harmful to water quality as is dumping sodium, it does  
contribute to nutrient pollution of water systems which ultimately has a  
deleterious effect on all living things, not just we up-right bipeds.


-- 
=== * ===
Rob Tom            ADT1
Kanata, Ontario, Canada