When homeowners in Salt Lake City and the surrounding area are considering getting a water softener for their home, some of them wonder if it will impact their drinking water. Is water softener water safe to drink? Will it taste different? The team at Kinetico has answers for you.
What Is Soft Water?
Soft water is water with most of the minerals removed from it. While many minerals are essential to the human diet, ordinary drinking water provides less than 1% of them, so removing minerals from your drinking water does not deprive you of healthy additives.
Soft water also has sodium added to it. Especially here in Utah, where we have the Great Salt Lake, we are aware that drinking saltwater can make you sick. An eight-ounce glass of seawater contains about 9,000 mg of salt — about two teaspoons. Experts recommend we consume no more than one teaspoon of salt per day.
Ordinary drinking water has varying amounts of salt in it based on what types of minerals are found in the ground from which the water is sourced. Softened water has about 20 mg of salt per eight-ounce glass, which is low enough to be imperceptible to most people.
So the short answer is yes, softened water is safe to drink, even for those on a low-sodium diet.
Reverse Osmosis Filters
If for some reason you do not want your drinking water softened, you have options.
Most people who get a water softener in their Utah home do so because of the benefits it provides. These include helping appliances last longer, getting clothes cleaner and making it easier to rinse soap out of hair and off skin. When you have a water softener installed in your home, you won’t need to use as much laundry soap and shampoo. You also will not have to contend with scaling, spotting and stains on dishes and in bathrooms and washing machines.
While water softeners remove minerals from your water supply, they do not remove contaminants such as lead, arsenic and other heavy metals. If you are at all concerned with the quality of your water, you may want us to install a reverse osmosis filter in your home for you.
A reverse osmosis filter removes 95%-99% of contaminants from your drinking water, so you never have to worry about your family ingesting toxins or impurities. The filters are easy to change and the system comes with a 10-year warranty.
Get Soft Water in Your Utah Home
If you’re interested in installing a water softener or a reverse osmosis filter in your home, contact Kinetico today. We serve Salt Lake City, Provo, Herriman, Park City, Tooele, Bountiful and Ogden.