There is a popular misconception that water softeners add large amounts of salt to your water to make it soft. This is untrue! If you check out my video on how a water softener works you will soon see that salt is not actually added to your water as it passes through your water softener, rather, the salt is used to make brine which is used to regenerate and clean the media inside the water softener.
So is there any more sodium in the water after the water flows through the water softener than before? Yes, but very little, due to the ion exchange process that takes place to soften your water. Should you be concerned about this?
Recently I decided to find out exactly how much sodium is added by taking a sample of the tap water from our store and another sample of the water after it passed through our water softener and have them both analyzed for sodium content by a laboratory that specializes in testing water and compare the results.
I was shocked! Remember that drinking water guidelines for sodium is 200 mg/l and for people on sodium restricted diets it is 20 mg/l. The raw tap water tested as 8.37 mg/l while the water that had passed through our water softener tested as 8.79 mg/l., an addition of .42 mg/l. So although there was a slight increase it still did not increase the sodium level to even ½ the amount for a sodium restricted diet. So how does this relate in the real world? As a comparison, you would need to drink 2,000 glasses of this softened water for the additional sodium added by softening to equal the sodium in one bagel! That is how little sodium is being added. In fact it is virtually nothing, so no, there is nothing to be concerned about.
If you want to remove 95% of the total sodium and other minerals in your water you need a Reverse Osmosis system to give you super pure, delicious drinking water!