How & Why Get Salt and Potassium out of Water?
Posted by Alkaline Water Plus on 18th Mar 2012
I had a phone call the other day asking about a filter that gets potassium out of water. I wanted to explain in detail here why you should filter this out if you have a water ionizer, and the best way to do so.
Salt and Potassium based Water Softeners
The two most popular water softeners that are used today use either salt or potassium to exchange with the “hard” mineral, calcium.
Salt and potassium should not be constantly run through a water ionizer as these are both conductive minerals. It will wear on the plates and cause the ionizer to not be as effective.
If your water has excess salt or potassium in it, you need to filter it out (if you want to protect your water ionizer from excess wear and tear).
Reverse Osmosis
Reverse osmosis is the best way to filter out salt or potassium. Both salt and potassium dissolve very thoroughly in water. This is why you must use Reverse Osmosis to get it out.
If you think about it, sea water has salt in it. If it was easy to get salt out of water, we wouldn’t have a water conservation problem on our planet.
RO [reverse osmosis] will filter out most other toxins as well! The only thing to keep in mind when using reverse osmosis with a water ionizer is that you must then remineralize the water. In order for electrolysis to work, you must have minerals in the water.
Another option you would have if you didn’t want to get an RO [reverse osmosis unit] would be to install a direct water line to hook the water ionizer up to. In this event, you would want to protect against hard water as the problem with excess calcium in water is that it will tend to scale the insides of the water ionizer. We do have devices to reduce/control scale, so give us a call if you’re interested in that.
Ionizer Set-Up
The good thing is that once you have your ionizer set up properly, you won’t need to do much to keep it working at it’s best!
Read more about water filtration basics.