Ion exchange trades calcium and magnesium for sodium (or potassium) on an equivalent basis. The resin does not know or care whether the water started at 5 or 55 grains per gallon. It swaps one equivalent of hardness for one equivalent of sodium each time. The average is about 7.5 milligrams per liter of sodium added for every grain per gallon of hardness removed.
Blogs
Are you over-softening your water?
A village newsletter landed on my desk recently, and the headline was bold enough to make anyone reach for their softener bypass valve: “YOU MUST(more…)
Membrane scaling calculations
Scaling is what happens when a sparingly soluble salt exceeds its capacity to stay dissolved and precipitates out onto whatever surface is nearby: a membrane, a heat exchanger tube, the inside of a boiler, the element in a water heater.
Water can undermine your metabolism
Your water supply is either supporting your metabolic health or quietly undermining it. Most people think about insulin resistance in terms of what they eat and how much they move. Those things matter enormously, but there’s a third variable almost nobody talks about: what they drink, and specifically, what’s dissolved in it.
Bacteria in your well water
The ideal condition for drinking water is no bacteria at all because the presence of bacteria of any type means there is a potential pathway(more…)
Your gloves are telling you lies
The microplastics story is a particularly clean illustration of something I think about constantly: the act of measurement changes what you’re measuring. Every time a sample is collected, handled, transferred, stored, processed, and analyzed, there are opportunities to introduce error. Some of those errors elevate contaminant counts. Some suppress them. Protocol compliance reduces the risk, it does not eliminate it.