[Greenbuilding] Water Softener Filters

[RT]

On Sun, 01 Feb 2015 13:15:40 -0500, Antonioli Dan <solardan26 at gmail.com>  
wrote:



> If potassium is used as a fertilizer then why are you claiming that it  
> is a “nutrient pollution?”

Fertilising our groundwater,creeks, ponds, rivers and lakes, like adding  
fertiliser to soil, supports and accelerates plant growth. When growing  
crops for human consumption, that may be a good thing.

When the "crop" is algae in/on water, it's not such a good thing. If fact,  
it's a Very Bad Thing. True, the most talked-about culprits are N and P,  
but it's not a stretch to suspect that K is also a culprit.

>
> The amount of potassium that’s found in compost from all the  
> potassium-rich kitchen scraps is probably higher than what comes out of  
> the filter from a  potassium chloride softener.

Whenever I'm in town and see people in stores schlepping home heaping  
cart-fuls of bagged and pailed salt for their water softeners and it makes  
me cringe every time I see it.

If I dumped that much salt into my compost bins, I'm pretty sure that it'd  
pickle and kill that compost to the point of it being toxic to any plants  
to whose soil had that compost added.

Out of curiosity, I Googled "Household water softener salt consumption"  
and one of the hits was the following formula (example for a household of  
two retired persons):

http://www.watertechonline.com/articles/hot-topic-salt-usage-calculation

============ copied Google-hit material (ie not necessarily factual) =====
A standard calculation for salt usage could be done as follows:

[No. of people x gallons per person in one day x 110 (hardness)] ÷  
efficiency of salt exchange. 2 x 65 = 130 x 110 = 14,300 grains in one  
day. Divided by 2,000 grains removal per pound of salt equals 7.15 pounds  
per day.
90 days at 7.15 = 643.5 pounds
============= end of copied material ===================================

If the above is accurate, that sounds like an alarming $#!+-load of salt  
to me.
That figure, when extrapolated to a time period of 20 years (ie 640 lbs x  
4 (qtrs per year) x 20 (years) = over 50,000 lbs (??!!), it would come as  
no surprise as to why it might kill the beneficial microbes in a septic  
system leading to the premature failure of the filter media in a septic  
field.


-- 
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Rob Tom
Kanata, Ontario, Canada

A r c h i L o g i c  at  Y a h o o  dot  c a
(manually winnow the chaff from my edress if you hit "reply")

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