::Shuts off Def Leppard::
I have questions about said topics. Our house has community well water, so it is treated before entering the water system to feed our house. We have a water softener already installed, the kind you dump bags of salt into. We also have a whole home humidifier (GeneralAire 900), required by the builder because we have engineered wood floors. The humidifier has a filter that needs to be swapped out every couple of months. I'll admit I did not know this when we first built the house and may have gone a while until I noticed water spraying out of it one day. Oops... Now I change it regularly.
That said, the humidifier filter housing has gotten very crusty and has been dripping on the floor even after filter changes. I just soaked it for a couple of hours in CLR and barely made a dent. The furnace filter also gets dirty fairly quickly and we change it at least every two months. Some of that is due to the crusty flakes falling off of the humidifier housing.
Questions:
Would a whole home water filter placed after the water softener help with this situation?
Do you have any recommendations on a system that won't break the bank, but doesn't need a filter every week.
I'm doing my internet searches as well, but GRM knows EVERYTHING.
Thanks!
is the softener before or after the humidifier? you do not want the humidifier after the softener. when the water evaporates it will leave behind the salt crystals on the humidifier filter clogging it up. is this the crusty flakes you mentioned? i would put the filter as the first device on the incoming water. from there go into the water humidifier and water softener in parrallel. From the softener go into the water heater and the rest of the house.
In reply to FieroReinke :
Unfortunately the setup won't allow that. The supply for the humidifier comes off of the water heater. The softener is also on the other side of the basement. Current setup is: Water supply -> Softener -> Heater -> Humidifier. It also worries me that all that salt from the softener is going into the water heater. I do drain it every year.
In reply to PMRacing :
To keep a humidifier clean you need to use distilled water. One source of that is air conditioners. I buy it for $.94 cents a gallon. But recycle the plastic bottles and cardboard boxes.
I buy drinking water from an underground cave that takes 3000 years for water to get in. Thus no micro plastics or trace radiation like every other water source has. The water is so pure and clean it doesn't need any treatment such as chlorine and fluoride which nearly all other water does.
water in my house goes through 3 filters and water softener except the ice cube water which get a reverse osmosis treatment as well
We considered a whole house reverse osmosis water purification system, but after some research, cost deterred us in the end.
Ended up with a Berkey for drinking water and vitamin C shower filter. I’m happy.
We don’t have a humidifier so I can’t help there.
The amount of salt that makes it into your water supply is next to zero. The salt in the softener is not used in the water, it's used to descale the softener. The softener uses one of several methods to remove minerals - usually electrolysis to draw the mineral ions to the walls of the softener. Then on a schedule it flushes the softener with brine and flushes that salt water back to the brine tank (or down a drain) before sending fresh water back into the softener. The ionic nature of salt dissolute attracts the minerals in the softener and takes them away. The amount of salt left over in your house water is so tiny that it makes no impact on things.
Put it this way, does the water taste salty when you drink it? In order for the salt to be the cause of the humidifier wick problems, it would have to be pretty salty. Many people are under the assumption that the sodium ions that remain in the softener are going into the water. Tiny fractions sometimes do, but their job is to stick to the anodic substrate in the softener which are replaced by magnesium and calcium. But the amount of sodium ions that get released from the substrate into your house water is so small that it is negligible... as in hundreds of times less than the mass of minerals that the softener pulls out of the water.
I have a brine water softener in two properties and no softener in my home. None of them have any abnormal issues with humidifiers, taste, or scaling.... At least no more than normal. All water has junk dissolved in it which accumulates on the humidifier wick as the water evaporates.
I would suggest that if you're having trouble, either the softener or the humidifier isn't working as designed.
Excellent.! I use my water softener as my primary filtering system then several stages of filtering and finally the reverse osmosis filter to the ice cube maker.
Having said that I drive over 350 miles round trip to buy a pickup truck filled with drinking water.
My Grandmother always said save money wherever you can but not on what you put in your body.
