Soften Hot Water?!?

[heytom]

Greetings - first post on this forum. I recently sold my home where I had a typical residential softener that regenerated via salt and moved into a condo. This condo has VERY hard water, and worse yet, this building has a common boiler for hot water. So while our monthly maintenance includes all the cold water and hot water we want, I would like to soften it.

Coming into the condo under the master bath vanity is two main shut off's one for cold and one for hot water. I could see re-plumbing this cold water supply to go to one of these smaller resin tanks like people take with them in their RV, etc. and then remove it periodically to have a softener company regenerate it, but that would only give me soft COLD water.

I was wondering if I also re-routed the hot water plumbing to a second small resin tank (I know, this is a lot of equipment to put under a vanity in a bathroom), do you see any issues with running hot water through a softener resin tank other than it might take longer for the water to get hot since the water in this tank would cool down when not in use?

Any other ideas how to get softwater in this condo other than convincing the other 111 units in this building that they have been putting up with lousy water and we should invest in a building wide, industrial softener?

Thanks! - Tom

 

[ditttohead]

There are several problems with softened at water at a POU application rather than a POE. Since softeners are only capable of a very specific capacity, a certain quantity of resin is needed. This volume creates a unique problem in that the water in the tank will get cold fairly quickly, and you will be constantly running a lot of water trying to get hot water. It is definitely better to try to convince everyone to share in the cost of a softener.

We manufacture a regenerable shower softener, it is a terrible product since every time you change the shower temperature the water takes a minute or two to actually change at the shower head, people are always chasing the right temperature.

 

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[heytom]

There are several problems with softened at water at a POU application rather than a POE. Since softeners are only capable of a very specific capacity, a certain quantity of resin is needed. This volume creates a unique problem in that the water in the tank will get cold fairly quickly, and you will be constantly running a lot of water trying to get hot water. It is definitely better to try to convince everyone to share in the cost of a softener.

We manufacture a regenerable shower softener, it is a terrible product since every time you change the shower temperature the water takes a minute or two to actually change at the shower head, people are always chasing the right temperature.

Thanks... talked to one other owner in this condo. Their solution was to only use the supplied "Cold Water" in the POU condo. From there they used a small softener and then installed a tankless water heater, passing up on the "free hot water" that all the residents get from the building's boiler, but they have their own soft hot and cold water now.

I guess I would have to determine if having soft water trumps the cost of using my own electricity to make hot water.

Tom

 

[ditttohead]

Great solution. Since you own the condo, upgrades like this makes sense. The electrical use for tankles water heaters is not too bad. They have a huge amp draw but you are only using hot water for a very short amount of time. Unlike an AC that runs for hours, hot water usually only runs for a few minutes at a time.