Water Hardness

[katmat]

Got a cottage in lower Michigan that I use on weekends thru out the year.
Have a home outside of Chicago & we have greart water from Lake Michigan.
Previous owners were year around residents. They had a Culligan water softener that regenerates on a time cycle rather than by usage.
I had the water tested without the softener & the results were:
Hardness 9 grains per gallon
Total dissolved solids 345 parts per million.
What options would you recommend?
New softener, use existing softener & just regenerate manually when I'm there
or are there filters that I can use?

Thanks,
Matt

 

[RickP]

Your current softener will probably work fine, especially if the prior owners used it while living there. But having to regenerate it manually will be a real pain. I guess it depends on how much you'll hate having to regen manually? As an alternative, you could set it to regen once every two weeks or put it on a timer that only runs while you're there. Buying a usage-monitoring head for your current softener might be an option too, but that would be costly.

There are probably smartphone apps and hardware that would take care of it for you, but that sounds like more trouble than it's worth for a cottage.

 

[garrett1812]

The hardness is pretty low, but you will probably want to add a solids filter.