In article ,
"J. Clarke" wrote:

Sheldon wrote:
On Mar 1, 9:41?pm, Charles wrote:
On Sat, 1 Mar 2008 18:12:11 -0800 (PST), Sheldon

wrote:





Charles wrote:
"SteveB" wrote:

I believe that the hose bibs on the outside of my house are
hooked to the soft water system. ?Is there any disadvantage to
watering with soft water? They're about to turn on the
irrigation
water system in our rural area, but I need to get around and
water some of the trees before that.

For occasional watering it is fine. ?For steady use I'd avoid it.
Most softening systems replace the calcium and magnesium with
sodium. Plants need calcium and magnesium, sodium is toxic. ?Over
time it will build up, change the soil properties.

That's not true. ?There is no more salt contained in softened
water
than there is in the bottled water that people drink, usually
less.
If softened water contained salt then it wouldn't be softened
water,
now would it. ?The salt used by water softeners leaves the sytem
as
grey water (along with the other minerals the system removes),
that
never enters the domestic water. ?If the typical water softener
uses a pound of salt a day it's a lot, usually will use closer to
1/2 pound/ day. ?The trick is to find a way for disposing of the
grey water without it building up in one spot. ?My grey water
(water from my water softener, dehumidifier, and RO filter) is
piped by gravity to a creek, the same creek that collects run off
from many thousands of acres of lands as the creek meanders over
many miles, which includes the many tons of salt spread on the
roads in winter by the highway department.. my couple handfulls of
salt a day is so negligible that it doesn't count. ?And salt is
not
toxic it's a necessity of life, a salt lick for live stock places
more salt into the ground than any water softener. ?Softened water
contains very little salt, certainly far less than if the water
were not softened.

Wrong, unless you are using a dual ion exchange system. ?The common
household water softener just exchanges calcium and magnesium ions
for sodium. ?The carbonate, sulfate, or whatever else is in the
water
stays where it is.

http://home.howstuffworks.com/home-a...aundry/questio...

Your reading comprehension skills are near the 3rd grade elementary
school level, and I'm being quite generous.

[per your web site]
"Regeneration involves soaking the beads or zeolite in a stream of
sodium ions. Salt is sodium chloride, so the water softener mixes up
a
very strong brine solution and flushes it through the zeolite or
beads
(this is why you load up a water softener with salt). The strong
brine
displaces all of the calcium and magnesium that has built up in the
zeolite or beads and replaces it again with sodium. _The remaining
brine plus all of the calcium and magnesium is flushed out through a
drain pipe. "_

You're confusing "sodium" with "salt". The process is that sodium
ions are picked up on the surface of the zeolite. Not "salt", just
one of the chemical components of it. Those are exchanged for
less-reactive calcium and magnesium ions in the water, so calcium
carbonate (or magnesium sulfate or whatever) gets turned into sodium
carbonate (or sodium sulfate or whatever) with a slight release of
energy. The calcium and magnesium ions then remain on the suface of
the zeolite until such time as it is regenerated by exposure to sodium
chloride at which time it picks up the sodium ions and the calcium
goes into the brine as calcium chloride.

So the softened water has no "salt" added, what is has is the existing
calcium and magnesium compounds turned into sodium compounds. The
quantity of the compounds doesn't change, what changes is their
chemical composition.

If you think that a water softener works by "adding salt" then try
adding salt to hard water and then have the hardness checked with and
without salt and see what you get.

--

From my pitiful short garden experience.

* Water from rain is best
* then Water from rain barrels
* then Water from softener
* then Water from the hard line.
* Let plants die.

When I use my hard line my garden does not grow very well.
Still better than no water at all. I have also found that flowers does
seem to hold up better with the soft water than vegetables.

Most water softeners are first run through a sediment filter taking out
some nasty stuff first. Hard lines tend to come straight out of the well.

Depending on the size of your garden that softener can get expensive, if
it is a large one. If you are very rich and do not care, use the water
from the R.O. purification system from your drinking water.

Their are some companies that make inline water filters for the outside
water lines (also not cheap). I will let you do the searching.

Enjoy Life ... Dan

--
Email "dan lehr at comcast dot net". Text only or goes to trash automatically.