Whole house water filtration/treatment...

[TBM]

Any experience or recommendations?

We had a whole house system in CA, but I think our needs are a bit different here and we want to do our homework before purchasing one here.

We listened to a boring presentation yesterday that pretty much confirmed our thoughts on the water here.

We are pretty knowledgeable about the pollutants, etc., and we are somewhat familiar with some of the types of water filters. The scripted demo was really geared toward people unfamiliar with anything, to scare them I guess. It was dry, and any humor was lost on this guy. He had no idea how to veer from the script and was thrown when DH would ask a question. He was also thrown by our lack of glassware, plastics, cookware and stuff that he wanted to use in the demo.


I did get my ceramic cooktop cleaned with treated water, along with the stainless sink that spotted so badly that I had told DH that I didn't want a stainless sink. Both still look pretty nice, and we get a $50 gift card for listening and dodging a hard sell. ; p

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[FoxInFiji]

So what are you looking to buy? A water softener? A whole house filter? RO system?

[TBM]

May 20, 2013 10:03:23 GMT -5 FoxInFiji said:

So what are you looking to buy? A water softener? A whole house filter? RO system?

Whole house filtration. Not RO

[jolita]

Was it Rainsoft that did the presentation, by chance? We had someone from there come to our home and do all of that, cleaned stuff with just water, tested and told us our city water is horrible, blah blah blah. We said we wanted to think about it but they convinced us to have someone come that day to install. We ended up calling the next day to have it removed after we did some online research and realized there was no need to spend $8,000 on the system. It was a huge pain trying to get in touch with anyone in the company to have them remove it, so we ended up with it for about a week. I do like the idea of the whole house filtration system, and we plan on getting another system, but if it is the same company, I would just do some research before committing with them. They had a ton of bad reviews online.

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[FoxInFiji]

We installed a whole house sediment filter that is a blow down style. Which means you don't have to turn off the water or drain your main line into the house to clean the filter. You just put a bucket under the filter and slowly open it and the water pressure cleans out the sediment. I don't think they make this style for all filter systems depending on what you're trying to filter out of the water.

Water spots are most likely just hard water (a combination of calcium and magnesium). The typical residential water softener is undersized and run way too often. To know for sure you should take a sample of your water and have it tested by your county lab. The at home kits have a huge error tolerance so they aren't accurate enough. We had multiple plumbers and water softener specialized come out to give us quotes on a water softener. They all said we needed the standard 24,000 grain system but when I got the results back from the lab I really needed a 48,000 grain system. So we bought and installed it ourselves. It's set to recharge every 2 weeks (not anywhere near the every 3 days a typical water softener is set to recharge) saving us lots of salt, water, and money.

There are a few other minerals that could also give you spots you'll want to be aware of but it's best to get a test done first before you invest in a system. You'll also want to know if you have much iron in your water as that will affect the type of resin used in the water softener.

[TBM]

May 20, 2013 11:46:56 GMT -5 jolita said:

Was it Rainsoft that did the presentation, by chance?

No, it was someone else. I think they all do the hard sell, which always makes me back away. It might have been different if we had actually known what system they were going to present and could have researched it first, but we didn't have a clue.

[sratsey]

We have a Culligan softener system and RO for the drinking water.
Couldn't be happier. Not only did it get rid of the spotting on my glasses, but the stuff that had gross residue on it from 5 months of hard water, all washed off in time.