Want a solution for the whole house. What are you doing?
whole house softener and RO in the kitchen. All the difference in the world and worth the few extra bucks.
I soften the water. I would recommend going with a treatment company that will test your water and tell you what you need. Don’t just go to Sears (or whatever they are now), Home Depot, or Lowes and buy a $500 water softener. Also, your county may have restrictions about what kind of treatment you can use and how to discharge softened water.
Bernie
RO systems will not soften your water, however they will reduce the TDS (total disolved solids or salts) and remove any bacteria and virus. Typically residential RO systems are used only for drinking water due to the fact you waste about 2 gallons of brine water for 1 gallon of RO water.
If you are getting water from a municipal water district, you can get the water quality report from their website. It will tell you the total hardness and TDS level of your water. I live in So California and our water here is about 18 grains hardness and 500-600ppm TDS. An RO system will not change the hardness, however it will reduce the TDS to about 30-40ppm. A water softener before the RO will reduce almost all the hardness.
Now if your water source is coming from a well, then I highly recommend you have the water tested at a lab and get a full report. From there a local water company in your area can recommend a system for filtering your water and softening if needed.
I’m an engineer at a company that makes RO systems, so if you have any additional question let me know!
I am in Ventura County. For whatever reason, my tablet no longer wants to open QuickOffice to let me double check the quality report I downloaded and opened less than an hour ago, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t have a TDS measurement unless you’re referring to the column for ppb of inorganic chemicals. Im pretty sure there wasn’t a measurement of grains as you’ve framed it for hardness.
whole house softener and RO in the kitchen. All the difference in the world and worth the few extra bucks.
+1. I have a well. I went with Culligan. They come out every 6 months and test the water and perform any maintenance, filter changes, etc. The softener makes a huge difference with the laundry and showering. The RO is a system with a 5 gal pressurized holding tank in the basement. It supplies the filtered water to our ice cube maker and a separate faucet in the kitchen.
RO systems will not soften your water, however they will reduce the TDS (total disolved solids or salts) and remove any bacteria and virus. Typically residential RO systems are used only for drinking water due to the fact you waste about 2 gallons of brine water for 1 gallon of RO water.
If you are getting water from a municipal water district, you can get the water quality report from their website. It will tell you the total hardness and TDS level of your water. I live in So California and our water here is about 18 grains hardness and 500-600ppm TDS. An RO system will not change the hardness, however it will reduce the TDS to about 30-40ppm. A water softener before the RO will reduce almost all the hardness.
Now if your water source is coming from a well, then I highly recommend you have the water tested at a lab and get a full report. From there a local water company in your area can recommend a system for filtering your water and softening if needed.
I’m an engineer at a company that makes RO systems, so if you have any additional question let me know!
Cellulose Acetate ROs will remove hardness. The problem is rapid scaling of the flux side of the membrane which would require regular descaling with something like food grade citric acid (for potable water systems). But an RO will remove dissolved Ca, Mg, Al and ions… If you want to go all out then they way to go is to install a cartridge carbon filter (if need to capture organics and/or high chlorine conc. (>2ppm) to protect the RO), then an NaCl ion exchanger to remove Ca, Mg, Al and other ions and finally an RO to ‘polish up’ the water - remove some of the lighter ions (Na+) and any TDS.
The rule of thumb is that if you’re getting your water from a aquifer its probably hard and an ion exhanger will do the trick. If you’re water comes from a surface source (lake or river) its probably has organics / TDS / TSS and a Carbon Filtration or RO or Nanofiltration system may be needed.
Very rarely will you need both IX and RO.
As others have said in either case you have to have a softener.
Personally I can’t tell a huge difference between the RO water and the stuff coming out of the tap that is softened…and the stuff comes out of the tap a LOT faster and I’m ADHD so I drink out of the tap 
~Matt
Water here is very hard.
For the whole house I use a normal softener.
However I have a saltwater reef tank in the living room, and the water coming out of the tap has something like 250-300 parts per million total disolved solids (TDS) .
Can’t put that water in the tank as it leads to horrible algae breakouts and bad conditions for the corals in the tank. So I have a RO/DI (reverse osmosis/deionization) unit in the basement. It has two lines out. The first line out is before the deionization unit and goes straight to the refridgerator/ice maker. Since installing it the water coming out of the fridge has about 20 ppm TDS. Also, interesting that the ice is now almost crystal clear instead of cloudy as it was before.
The second line coming out of the unit passes through the deionization unit and is ultra pure and is used just for the fish tank. It consistently reads 0.0 ppm.
I got the unit off ebay for $150 and it was a bargain compared to what you’d pay retail. It is 6 stage (1 sediment, 2 carbon, 1 reverse osmosis membrane, 1 carbon polishing stage, 1 deionization stage) and it also came with a 3 gallon pressure tank. This pressure tank is on the line to the refridgerator. If you have any experience with RO systems you know that they make water slowly. The pressure tank took about two hours to fill up but it holds the 3 gallons and there’s an inflated air bladder in it so it has a constant supply of fresh water to the fridge, so if you are filling up something with water out of the fridge it has plenty of pressure and water in reserve to fill most anything you could think of and is always ready to go.
If you are in a rural setting, talk to your local extension agent (land grant university with an ag program) about what local people are doing.
We have lots of iron and sediments in our well water. We use a fine screen pre-filter on what comes out of the pressure tank. It needs flushing every other week or so - it collects a lot of rust-colored solids. I like that better than the fiber cord filters that need replacing. We then have a Morton System Saver water softener. It’s very easy to maintain and clean. I clean the screen/mesh filter for that once a year. Softened water feeds all our taps and our ice-maker.
Our water tastes fine out of the tap. So we don’t see a need for an RO system. I’d just start with a softener, and then see how that goes before you try adding RO. Also, get some kind of whole-house prefilter to go before the softener/RO - it will save you in the long run.
Want a solution for the whole house. What are you doing?
Now if your water source is coming from a well, then I highly recommend you have the water tested at a lab and get a full report. From there a local water company in your area can recommend a system for filtering your water and softening if needed. ]
+1
As simple as that…
Fred.