There's citric acid based softeners as well like nuvoh2o https://nuvoh2o.com/
Not sure how it affects septic systems though.
this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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Sounds pretty similar to one I was considering: https://www.aosmithatlowes.com/products/water-filters/whole-home/ao-wh-dsclr/
As I understand it, there is a difference between "softening" and "conditioning", and almost all the saltless systems are "conditioners",but for most people it doesn't matter.
I've been intrigued by the magnetic ones, just because they sound and look like the snake oil things that are sold to increase gas mileage in cars, but actually seem to work.
To be honest, as long as my appliances don't have a shorter life, I don't have to use extra soap everywhere, and I don't have scale build up or hard water stains, that's all that really matters.
Brine discharge can be pretty bad for the environment, so we do some tank exchange thing with Culligan. Every other week they install a new tank and remove the old one to be recharged. Working great so far.
That's neat. How much do they change you? Does the salt just get released into the environment at their facility instead at your home?
It's about $50 a month. Nothing gets released at my house, which is nice. I'm a little out of my depth with the chemical reaction, but the idea is inside the tank are a bunch of resin beads impregnated with stuff calcium and magnesium ions will bind to. So as water flows through the tank the calcium and magnesium is removed and stored in the beads. So the beads store it, but can't store an infinite amount. The tank gets switched out every 2 weeks and culligan takes the old tank back and reverse the process. I'm sure this involves nasty stuff, but hopefully economy of scale and regulations make it a cleaner process than just dumping the salt in the ground.
Culligan takes the tank and runs salt water through it.
maybe they re-use the brine on more tanks and it has less of an impact, and maybe they post-process the water to be friendlier.
but you’ve just described a regular water softener with extra steps.