A water hardness test strip recently arrived from Morton Salt:
I call it between 7 and 15 gpg. Based on the feel of the water just before regeneration, I’d been guesstimating 15 gpg, so it’s within reason.
I’ll back the softener off to 10 gpg and see what happens.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
Comments
9 responses to “Water Hardness”
Things could be worse…
“the burning water of Tapa”
http://www.forgottenairfields.com/estonia/laane-viru/tapa-s273.html
Much worse!
Radiation! But this time I don’t blame the russkies…
https://www.suomenradonhallinta.fi/en/radon-information/radon-and-household-water
Just ordered a strip. I think our water is only a bit hard (iron sulfate + calcium carbonate), while some neighbors have absurdly hard water. The joys of living in a geothermal area, I suppose.
IIRC, your water has so many other interesting minerals!
The old shared well and casual plumbing practices gave ample opportunities for contamination. We disinfected our new well and the piping and got rid of the occasional flatworm in the faucet. Both the other houses on the old well are vacant, but I’ll suggest the decritterization procedure once someone moves in. Inexpensive to do; fresh bleach is cheap and a potable water hose doesn’t cost much, either.
Somehow, we never got sick from the old system (filter pitcher helped), but we never let guests drink the tap water.
I use a TDS meter to keep track of water from my various tube wells!
Wish they’d been so cheap, back when we used well water around here!
Nice tool, but I think I can resist. [grin] It would be nice to have more than one acceptable dishwasher product (the others form a gel in our water, clogging everything), but we don’t have room for a softener.
I might try one of the qualitative analysis kits; I don’t think the quantities would change much over time.