Water Softener Installation in San Antonio, TX

It comes down to two numbers: how hard your water is and how much of it your household uses. Softeners are rated in grains of capacity, meaning how much hardness they can remove before they need to regenerate. Multiply your hardness by daily water use and you know how fast a given unit will exhaust. San Antonio water is hard enough that a family of four in a three-bath house usually needs more capacity than the smallest units on the shelf, but oversizing wastes money and lets the resin sit too long between cycles. We test your water at the tap, ask about the household, and size from there. A unit that regenerates every few days on a sensible schedule is the goal.

It is the builder doing you a favor. A softener loop is a section of the main water line, usually two capped pipe stubs on the garage wall near the water heater, that routes all the water for the house through one spot so a softener can be connected without cutting into the plumbing. There is normally a hose bib or drain nearby for the regeneration cycle and an outlet for the control valve. Homes built across the far west side, Stone Oak and the I-35 suburbs in the last couple of decades almost all have one. Connecting a softener to an existing loop is a short, clean install, and it is the cheapest a softener will ever be to add to that house.

Not salty, but different. A softener exchanges hardness minerals for a small amount of sodium, in proportion to how hard the water was to begin with. In San Antonio the water is hard, so the sodium added is more than it would be in a soft-water city, but it is still far below what most people would describe as salty; the change people notice is more that the water feels slick and lacks the mineral taste they were used to. If anyone in the house is on a sodium-restricted diet, or you simply prefer the taste, a reverse osmosis tap at the kitchen sink removes the sodium along with everything else for drinking and cooking. Many of our softener installs include one.

Yes, and we usually recommend it. There is no benefit to softening water that goes onto the lawn, and softened water on plants and soil is not ideal over time. Skipping the irrigation also means the softener regenerates less often and uses less salt. In a house with a builder loop, the outdoor lines often already branch off before the loop. In an older home where we cut the loop in, we can leave the hose bibs and the irrigation feed upstream of the softener. Tell us which outdoor taps you want hard and which you want soft, such as a spigot for washing a car, and we will plumb it that way.

Salt depends on your hardness and water use, but for a typical San Antonio household expect to add a bag or two every month or so; keep the brine tank about half full and never let it run empty. Service is lighter than most people think. Once a year, check that the brine tank has not formed a salt bridge, a hard crust that leaves the water below it untouched, and clean the brine well. Resin beds last many years on city water, less on wells with iron. If you notice scale returning, the unit running through brine too fast, or the control head cycling at odd hours, call us. Care Club members get the softener looked at during the annual plumbing inspection.