It's true the softeners do increase the sodium content of your water, but not enough to make it taste salty. I forget the actual math but I read that even if you drink an abnormally large ammount of tap water, it will only be a couple hundred milligrams a day of sodium, compared to 2000mg per day dietary suggestion. So it's something to be aware of if you are very sodium sensitive, but usually not a problem. There is also potassium salt available for use in water softeners which works just the same, but check with your manufacturer to make sure your resin will work with potassium.
Potassium is very similar to sodium, as it is next to sodium on the periodic chart. While both are necessary for survival, potassium is more toxic than sodium. Potassium chloride is even used as one of the injections for lethal injection executions.
I have seen toxicity levels for humans as low as 20 mg/kg for oral ingestion. If your water hardness is 20 mg/L, then using these numbers a person weighing roughly 200 lbs would have to drink 90 L (roughly 23 gal) of water faster than their body can remove. While you will probably get water poisoning before potassium poisoning at this rate, recalculate for an small child (roughly 25 lbs) assuming the toxicity is the same for an adult (which it's probably lower), and that number is roughly 2.5 gal. Personally I don't think possibly consuming .5-1 gal is too unreasonable when you account for food cooked with the soft water and bathing in the soft water. I wouldn't be too comfortable feeding this to a nursing infant, or small child on a continual basis.
I am not saying you will kill your whole family if you use pure potassium chloride in your water softener, I am just saying that people should probably be aware of this. If small children/older people (who are usually the more susceptible) I would either mix potassium chloride and sodium chloride salts for regenerating the softener, or only use the softener on the hot water line.
Ah, ok. I'll have to double check my softener settings, I had very hard water, so I'm probably increasing the sodium in my water quite a bit. Don't want to replumb so my kitchen faucet because the scaling problem was so bad that even the faucets were getting gunked up. And despite what another site said, my faucets are noticably descaling over time and cleaning, no need for lime-away.
Not being on a sodium restricted anything; not to mention that I don't generally use salt as a spice anyways, I figure I should be good.
Maybe I should buy and use one of those labratory water tests; tell me exactly what's in my water.
If you know someone that works in a lab (or has access to one) you can get them to help. I would take a small glass sample jar, and weight it with an analytical lab balance. Then have them pipette a sample of your water, then either let it all evaporate or boil it off. Weight it again then subtract the remainder, and you have the mass of "hardness" to a the +/- .1 mg (depending on the model). If they used a pipette you will have the volume to a very accurate degree (if they know how to use it). This is, of course, if the lab doesn't have the capability of testing water hardness.
Or you could order a testing kit.
