Reviews for Best Water Softeners

Iron Pro 2 Combination water softener iron filter Fleck 5600SXT digital metered valve 64,000 grain, 64k for whole house

Top positive review

We bought a house last year in a small town which draws its water from many natural wells. In our water, the iron content is Insane. It’s all RED. It’s so full of iron, I’m not even sure if the city will even bill us for water. There was a tiny under-powered water softener in the house that regenerated every couple of hours to keep up. Needless to mention, there was something we had to do.

Top critical review

With plenty of iron, we have nice water …. I’m not positive it’s going much better than my little softener because it’s using salt like mad. I tested all the settings followed by directions that did all I was meant to do … Ok, not that pleased with the water quality. After that, I’m going to add a small softener to get improved water quality, which is not what I wanted to do, but I wasted a lot of money on this softener and I don’t want to buy another more pricey one. If anyone has hints on what could be wrong, let me know that I’m a game.

Fleck 5600SXT 64,000 Grain Water Softener Digital SXT Metered Whole House System

Top positive review

It’s efficient, it’s inexpensive, it’s simple to instal. We’ve got three bathhouses and three daughters, so we have a lot of water to go though. A Whirlpool All-In-One (about $350 at Lowes), which worked fine, but used about 120lbs of salt per month, was our previous device. Only to not have to contend with the rough water spots and expand on it, it was still worth it. This machine has been working for 2 months on the same 80lbs of salt. A very good improvement. This machine at Salt is going to pay for itself.

It arrived (free delivery) at my home and all I had to do was buy the flex lines. Our garage already had a loop installed, so it took about 20 minutes to hook it into the house once I had the device assembled (also quick-just watch the video on YouTube). Results began to be noticed almost immediately-especially on the glass shower doors. In my view, there’s no reason to spend thousands for a softener. With this buy, I’m very pleased.

Top critical review

Pressurized tank cracked and leaks

In just over 6 months, the big pressurized water tank created a leak. Based on the positive feedback and the fact that they advertised that they were shipping the tank with the philtre material already inside the tank, they purchased it in December. This is such that when it is shipped, you don’t have to do the job of inserting the philtre material in the tank. More on why this isn’t such a smart thing to follow. By the end of June, a huge pressurized water tank was leaking from a crack in the wall of the tank (see photos). We had to detach before I was able to get a new tank to replace this one, as the seller said it could not be fixed

DuraWater 64k-56sxt-10al 64,000 grain water softener, Almond

Top Positive review

First, I’ll remember that it was a laborious ordeal to pick out a water softener on my own, and I made some mistakes along the way. My misconception about how to measure the hardness of water was the greatest flaw. I purchased a TDS metre, hoping that the hardness of my water would tell me that. That was a pretty significant error because it led me to oversize my water softener by assuming that my water was harder than it actually was. Granted, we are a family of seven, soon to be eight, and within the next 10 years our water intake will rise, but I would also have liked to scale it better and not be oversized.

Other than that, the only complaint I have is that learning how to configure the metre can be a little difficult. It’s not very intuitive and it took me a little bit to find out that I didn’t leave the “edit mode” when I was doing the settings and everything just kept being reset. That made a difference until I actually pulled up the programming video on YouTube, but I still feel like it’s not fully user-friendly when programming

I paid a plumber to instal this for me with respect to implementation, and it went pretty smoothly. He was attentive in reading the instructions given and it all seemed to be fine. The installation was a little over $500 for me, so make sure you account for that amount. I had Culligan and Kinetico come and send me estimates and harassed me with $3000 + (Softener + installation), and I ended up being less than 1/2 of that.

. Be mindful that the resin tank comes pre-installed with some resin (presumably around 2 cu ft for the 80k grain model) and that there is a chance that the resin and gravel at the bottom of the resin tank will be combined or moved because the shippers don’t hold it upright. This had no effect on mine, but my plumber warned me of the potential concern. My package for the resin tank was also pretty dinged, but luckily the tank itself was not damaged.

This all-in-all softener worked nicely for me. I see hardness ranging from around 15 gpg to 1.5 gpg and have not really seen a decrease in water pressure, but I have not directly tested it. What I did not think of before having a softener is that when the hardness is replaced with sodium, the flavour of water improves. Just after startup, it was more apparent and has gotten better now that it has been in operation for a while and we’re hopefully more used to it. That being said, you may want to get a RO machine or even just skip the drinking water softener .

Top critical review

I hooked it up and it didn’t even last a month because they shipped it pre-loaded and filled the tubing with gravel, so the first time it attempted to go in its cycle, the gravel got trapped in the valve. The valve broke and the gears were stripped out. And they can not hide it now.