by wagolynn » Sat Oct 15, 2016 6:44 pm
Hi Soobee,
As I understand the problem.
The cheapest water softening system use an ion exchange resin, the resin eventually stops working and is restored by flushing with a brine (salt) solution.
A small amount of this brine solution tends to remain in the resin granules, and gets carried over into the water passing through the resin system, and therefore into the softened water output.
The resulting high sodium content of the water will cause high blood pressure.
The high blood pressure will tend to injure kidneys.
Another thought is, if your water comes from a well you probably have a septic tank for disposal of human waste, and waste water.
As this is a biological process it will stop working if it is subject to large amounts of brine solution.
I think, though I have not had time to confirm this, there is something called the blue baby syndrome, which is caused by soft water.
Drinking water softened in that way appears to be very risky.
There are some ceramic filters that claim to filter the calcium carbonate, and bacteria out of the water but I would expect the running costs to be high in terms of replacing the ceramic filter elements.