For residential application having up to 4 grains of hardness would still be considered soft water.
Water softener grains per pound salt.
For example a family of four uses 75 gallons of water each per day 300 gallons per day.
One grain of hardness is equal to 1 7 000 pound of rock.
Grains per gallon is the business standard approach for talking about water hardness.
How is the hardness of water measured.
Softeners of old might be rated at 3 000 grains per pound gr lb.
Jumping mg l by 17 1 will change it to gpg.
What does the grain capacity of a water softener mean.
Contingent upon where a water test is performed this data will be accounted for in mg l milligrams per liter or gpg grains per gallon.
What this means is a 32 000 grain capacity water softener will probably only deal with about 28 000 30 000 grains before regeneration is required.
The same goes if you use more water than an average family of four in one month.
Sound a bit confusing.
This is measured in grains so how many grains you can recover during the regeneration.
A water softener will use approximately 1 pound of salt to remove 2 400 grains of hardness from its water softening resin.
The rated capacity of a softener is the maximum number of grains of water hardness the unit can remove prior to regeneration.
A water softener softening 75 gallons of water per day that has 10 grains of hardness per gallon will use 5 ounces of salt to remove the hardness accumulated per day.
So if your water softener needs to regenerate once per week you should only have to add one 40 pound bag of water softener salt per month.
A grain of water hardness is comparable to 1 7000th of a pound.
The consumer programs the softener to use 18 pounds of salt per regeneration and ends up spending much more money on salt than anticipated.
I know it sounds complicated but in essence it means how much of the resin the softener can recharge with one pound of salt.
The efficiency of the softener can be simply described as the ratio of recovered capacity per pound of salt.
This of course is borne out in the typical rating of 24 000 grains on an eight pound per cubic foot setting.
If we take the same softener and regenerate it with 6 pounds of salt then we would make 2000 gallons of slightly hard water or about 333 gallons per pound of salt.
For instance if we take water with 10 grains of hardness and run it thought a 15 lb regenerated 30k softener we could expect to get about 3000 gallon or about 200 gallons per pound of salt.
The consumer realizes upon receiving the softener that the most efficient settings are to use 6 pounds of salt per regeneration and to set the system capacity to 20 000 grains.
Water softener efficiency is a term generally used to rate a water softener by the relationship to its recovered capacity per pound of salt nacl used in regeneration.