Does anyone have a water softener?

[Caneel]

We have city water at our home and it is just awful.  Not only is the chlorine so high that I can smell it, the water is also rather hard.  We have spent a lot of time other places this summer and when we aren't at home, I can really tell the difference in my skin and hair.  DH is all for getting a water softener but I don't even know where to start shopping for one.

Anyone out there with a water softener who can educate me?  I remember we had one when I was a kid and my mom was constantly buying "salt" and adding it to a tank.

[heatherdeg]

Yup... you still buy salt and add it to a tank.  Unless there are new and fancier ones although my experience is in the last 5-7 years.  I don't know if it actually removes the chlorine... does it?  And there's some kind of maintenance to do once in a while.  It couldn't' be anything overwhelming or I'd have remembered, but I know at one point we had a "salt bridge" in ours that dh had to break up because the water wasn't really coming out as softened as it should.

We did it for hard water rather than chlorine, though.

And dh is pretty handy, so he installed it himself.  We left the cold water to the kitchen sink and the outside spigot OFF the softened water.  First, no sense watering the lawn with softened water ($ and wear on the softener) and for the kitchen sink, we didn't want added sodium in our cooking.

[I Fly]

We had hard water issues with our plumbing and hot water heater, so we recently had to address this issue.  Our hard water is "15 grains" hardness.  We don't have chlorine or other issues, thankfully.  I don't believe a softener system will do anything about chlorine.  That would be a more standard filter.  We opted to get a water "conditioner" instead of "softener" because they don't require electricity or salt.  The salt gets discharged onto your land or into the sewage system, which is banned in many communities because the water is difficult to clean/reuse.  Our "conditioner" filtering system changes the minerals into a crystal form so that they won't attach to plumbing or our water heater - so we are fighting the "scale" but still have hard water.  The hard water itself never bothered us, just the water heater having 4 service calls and breaking after 18 months.  I thought this website was helpful when we were researching:

http://www.uswatersystems.com/

Good luck!