Have you noticed that since you’ve had a water softener installed your skin feels slippery or even slimy now? You need to be careful entering the shower because the floor is very slippery. When you wash dishes by hand do they tend to slide out of your hands in the water? What about your skin, do you find that your skin is so slippery after a shower it actually feels slimy? 

Can water be too soft? Can your water softener be causing this? I’ve heard a few families mention this phenomenon, I always find that it typically is one of two things causing this concern:

1) Use too much soap. One of the many advantages of water softener is that you can and should use less soap to get much better cleaning. This is one of the many ways a water softener will save your family money. Often you can get by with using 1/2 the soap you used before the water softener was installed. The excess soap causes the slipperiness.

2) Make sure the hardness settings in the water softener are correct. Often water softeners are installed by plumbers or DIYers without actually testing the and programming the water softener. The water softener default setting is way too high for your family and you end up with excessive sodium in your water after the regeneration which causes the slipperiness. Those incorrect settings also result in you using far more salt than you should, which is wasting your money.

3) Occasionally, I’ve run across the situation where the first two items mentioned above were fine, but the family still has concerns about this slippery feel. In those situations, you need to mix some untreated hard water with the treated soft water to make the water slightly “less hard”. If you have a WaterBoss or Aquamaster water softener you can slightly open the bypass to allow a little untreated past the bypass.

For other water softeners you would need to install a 3 way bypass around the water softener and leave the bypass slightly open to mix the water. This is not an exact process and requires a bit of trial and error to get the right amount of water mixing but it works great!

Check out this YouTube video of mine on 3 Way bypasses https://youtu.be/2EcQrrlxMqo