Did you know 85% of the homes in the United States are affected by hard water?  Even homes supplied with city water deal with hard water.  A simple appliance, a water softener, will rid hard water in your home.  Having a water softener in your home provides many benefits, but do you know how the water softening process works?

A water softener uses a process called ion exchange.  Inside your Kinetico water softener are tiny plastic beads called resin.  These resin beads hold ions such as sodium, hardness, and iron.  When you turn on a faucet in your home, hard water is pushed through the Kinetico water softener, and hard water enters the resin bed.  The hardness and iron ions attach to the resin beads.  When this occurs, the hardness ions are exchanged with sodium ions.  Once this happens, soft water is now traveling to your faucet.

Every so often, a water softener will need to regenerate and recharge its resin bed when the resin bed reaches its capacity of hard water ions.  With a Kinetico water softener, regeneration occurs after a certain number of gallons of water is used in the home.  The first regeneration process is to backwash all the hardness and iron ions out of the resin bed.  The next process is to take the salt, a salty saline solution, in the salt tank and flush the resin bed with sodium chloride.  The sodium ions attach to the resin beads, and the chloride ions are flushed down the drain.  After this occurs, the resin bed is recharged and is ready to give the home soft water.

Stuart Park, with Kinetico, explains how a water softener works in this short video: