Water Softener Installation

You live in one of the hardest water areas in the country

Not marketing. Published figures from the water companies that supply our patch:

Anything over 200 mg/l is classed as hard. The entire region sits between roughly 270 and 370. For context, BS 7593, the standard governing heating system water, says a scale reducer should be fitted where hardness is 200 mg/l or above. Every town we work in is comfortably past that.

The drinking tap, and why it matters more here than most places

A softener replaces hardness with sodium. The Drinking Water Inspectorate’s advice is direct: do not soften the water to the kitchen tap used for drinking and cooking, and where water is softened by base exchange it is important to provide an unsoftened outlet for drinking.

The groups the DWI names are specific: premature and young infants, whose kidneys are less able to clear sodium, and people on a medically prescribed low sodium diet. The NHS and UNICEF both say not to use artificially softened water to make up infant formula.

There is also a statutory limit. The Water Supply (Water Quality) Regulations 2016 set a maximum of 200 mg of sodium per litre at consumers’ taps.

Our own calculation, and we will show the working

This next part is Vantage’s own arithmetic from published figures, not a water company statement, and we are labelling it as such.

Ion exchange swaps each calcium ion for two sodium ions, which works out at roughly 0.46 mg of sodium added for every 1 mg/l of hardness removed. Apply that to the published hardness and existing sodium in the local supply zones and, if the water were fully softened with no unsoftened tap:

• Luton North would land at around 204 mg/l sodium
• Offley and Kimpton at around 207 mg/l
• St Albans South at around 202 mg/l
• Knebworth, Tewin and Dunstable at around 196 to 197 mg/l

Three of those sit above the 200 mg/l statutory limit and two more sit on it.

Which is why, in this part of the country specifically, the unsoftened drinking tap is not a nice to have. We fit it as standard, taken off the supply pipe upstream of the softener bypass, and we will not install a softener without one. If a company offers to leave it out to save you money, that tells you what you need to know about them.

Installing it legally, which is not optional

A salt regenerated softener is notifiable. Regulation 5 of the Water Supply (Water Fittings) Regulations 1999 requires advance notice to your water undertaker for a water treatment unit which produces a waste water discharge or requires water for regeneration. That is a softener, described exactly. The undertaker has ten working days, after which consent is deemed granted.

Worth knowing: the approved contractor exemption that removes the notification requirement for some jobs does not apply to water treatment units. Any installer telling you their approved status means no notification is needed is mistaken. We notify Affinity, Anglian or Cambridge Water as a matter of course.

The installation itself has two backflow requirements and they are different:

• Supply side, fluid category 2. A type EA or EB single check valve, fitted immediately before the tee feeding the softener. Some units call for higher protection, so we work to the specific product’s requirements.
• Drain side, fluid category 5. The regeneration discharge needs a type AA or AB air gap, or an air break to BS EN 1717, with a minimum unobstructed gap of 20mm or twice the diameter of the drain tube, whichever is greater. Never a direct connection into a waste trap. If yours is pushed straight into a sink trap, it is wrong.

Plus isolation valves either side, a bypass so the unit can be taken out of service without losing water, ready access to check salt, and frost protection if it is going anywhere unheated.

Metered or timer, and where it goes

Metered units regenerate based on the water you have actually used. Timer units regenerate on a schedule whether you were home or not. For almost every household, metered is the right answer and the salt saving pays the difference back.

Position is usually under the kitchen sink, in a utility room or a garage, and it needs to be somewhere you can reach to top up salt and get at the bypass. It needs a drain connection with the air gap described above, and depending on the unit it may need a fused spur. Block salt units are commonly non electric. We will confirm the requirements for the specific model rather than quoting a generic figure.