Am living “in the country” after decades of city or suburban life. We have a well, a septic tank, and a separate “drywell” for certain types of wastewater (notably, the clothes washer).
I need to put a 40 pound sack of salt crystals into the water softener every month. The house is 50 years old, so up to now, probably 500 to 600 (!) sacks, that’s 2000+ pounds of salt have been put into our yard through the septic system and drywell.
However, there is some drainage from our yard; presumably some of this salt and other minerals just leech through the soil and then is washed away by rainfall, etc.
How do these systems not clog up with solidified salt?
Why isn’t our yard a toxic, salted-earth zone?
Is the rate of salt leaving the “system” of our yard high enough that this isn’t a problem?
I ask because just putting this much salt into the system (not to mention the minerals that cause hardness in the first place) seems to me like something that would eventually reach a saturation point. And the engineer in me is going nuts trying to figure out if this system is “stable” or not.
This site says that regenerant brine from water softeners shouldm’t be discharged into septic systems. I’m not sure what you are meant to do with it instead, if you don’t have any mains drainage. That page says to direct it to storm drains, which may not be practical in your case.
Your softener rinse discharges into your septic? Mine goes into the sump which in your case probably goes into your drywell. Is your 50 year old septic drain field still in the same place it was 25-40 years ago? I had mine tested about 15 years ago to verify the drain field wasn’t going to fail 2 years after I blew the budget on a major addition. Quite a bit of crystalization showed up in the subsoil. Could see the white mineral layers developing in the then 30 year old drain field. That said, your drain field is for the most part below the grass root layer and IMO the salt flushes down through the ground towards your well. 10 ton of salt buried below the topsoil isn’t all that much when spread over an area the size of a drainfield. Mine has been spread over the yard for the past 25 years whenever the sump pump runs. Grass/dandelions don’t even show any difference from the other lawn parts slightly uphill from there.
My home’s water softener discharges into a drain in the basement that just empties as a pvc pipe in the woods, down hill from the house. The house was built in 2009, and when we bought it a few years ago, the home inspection guy took no notice of it, so I assumed it is all up to code. Are you certain yours drains to the septic system?
20000 pounds, yep, right. An even bigger number than I realized. Yikes.
No, only some salt goes into the septic system as toilet, shower and kitchen water all go there. The mineral discharge goes into the drywell, as does the brine. And, that drywell discharge has started to seep into the yard. Nearby, there’s a “river” of sorts (a swale) that drains the yard into about 5 miles of various fields, ditches and creeks before it eventually reaches the Wabash river.
So I guess much of this salt and other minerals have just gone into the soil, which apparently has a low enough concentration to continue to grow grass and trees.
I’m still staggered at the volume of minerals we’re talking here. Somebody, somewhere must have done some analysis work on where this stuff all goes, and how much you can put into the environment before it starts to cause harm.
You’re drinking the salt. That’s its job. The resin is recharged with the salt, and the job of the resin is to exchange the other salts in your water with the sodium chloride. You’re drinking, cooking, showering with dilute sodium chloride and, most importantly, piping dilute sodium chloride around your heating and water heater, where the harm it can produce there is minimal.
What was in your water was a solution of calcium and magnesium sulfates, carbonates and other things like bicarbonates and seqicarbonates (or not.) Those do damage boilers and heating pipes. But those are actually good for plant life. Actually, not all that bad for you to drink, either.
Now if the regeneration cycle sends 90% concentrated sodium chloride solution, 10% other salts to your septic, you may make plant life in the area suffer, but the septic tank may be able to adjust its population to survive, and plants can survive salt solution without becoming a dead zone.
Do the plants, in the vicinity of your septic field, look “funny” – stunted, leaves an odd color, things like that?
Interesting question. Where the drywell is leaking / seeping (not the septic, mind) there is a soft area, filled with acorn shells (under the oaks) and adjacent to a shallow drainage “ditch.” There is grass there, and usually mud, but nothing much else grows there. But we’ve not planted anything there either.
As for drinking water, I use a series of two filters, a faucet filter and a pitcher type, which together remove all the “yuck” out of our well water. (I don’t drink the softened water.) The first filter is to take out pesticides and heavy metals (farm fields are just across the street) and the second one is for taste. Together, they remove most of the minerals from the water, which I know because if left standing, the double-filtered water does not leave residue behind. I need to replace my filters about once per month.
The well water here (NW Indiana) is among the hardest water in the country.
Unfiltered, the water is hard, leaves a rusty residue, and it smells a little bad.
Softened, I see no residue but there’s a funny smell. The more water we pump out of the well, the less the smell. (So in the summer when we’re watering the plants in the yard, the smell is less.)
Filtered once and allowed to stand, the remaining hard water will leave a white residue and have an off-taste but no smell.
Filtered twice (second time for flavor) the water tastes and smells fine. Just like tapwater in Seattle (where I used to live)
That’s not how water softeners work, as I understand it, but I am happy to be corrected.
They replace the calcium ions in the calcium carbonate (etc) in the water, so, in very simple terms, your water ends up with sodium bicarbonate, and the water softener ends up with calcium ions on the beads. Softened water isn’t “salty” in the sense that it contains sodium chloride, or at least not an appreciable amount.
Then when the softener is flushed with brine, the sodium ions in the brine displace those calcium ions again, recharging the resin beads and producing calcium chloride which gets flushed down the drain.
So neither of the products from the softening process is actually sodium chloride. However, there will be excess sodium chloride brine that gets dumped down the drain during the regeneration process.
Well, it is as I feared: eventually the high concentration of mineral sludge has stopped flowing, both into and out of the drywell, causing a (brief) backup into the basement. We dug down to the drywell and indeed, it’s full of black gunk. This is not where sewage goes, again, it’s just greywater from the clothes washer and water softener rinse.
I had a local plumber auger out the pipe leading from the house to the drywell, which is a concrete cylinder set into the ground, with a concrete lid on it about one foot below ground. We took off the lid to gain access. The inlet pipe is about 4 inches of internal diameter, so it can store a lot of water from the house, almost a whole load of laundry water (which, being the old style of washer, is on the order of 30 gallons).
The outlet appears to not be a pipe at all, rather a french drain type field of large gravel. Just by digging gently into this outlet I was able to clear some rocks and clay, and supposedly the flow has improved. I’m going to insert a PVC collar to extend the outflow system a bit further into this gravel field, maybe this will resume flow as before (fingers crossed).
The local plumbers say that typically, these streams of waste water are supposed to be pumped, via a sump pump (~$1500 to install), over to the septic tank. Maybe the modern septic system can accommodate this mineral-rich water because there is so much fresh water in the septic system.
Most importantly, got to fix this one way or the other, before icy cold winter sets in. We need to be able to do laundry and get softened water regardless of the weather… will update again later.
Not sodium chloride, so the water won’t taste salty, but I believe you will take in sodium if you drink softened water. It’s not a terribly large amount. Unless you’re trying to limit sodium intake for some reason or you are, say, a baby drinking only formula made from softened water, it’s not likely to be majorly nutritionally relevant.
That said, some houses are set up so that the cold water to the kitchen isn’t softened. My house is like that. There’s a T before the softener, one side runs to the cold water at the kitchen sink, the other one runs to the water heater and to the rest of the cold taps. So as long as we flush the kitchen tap out with cold (draining any previously-heated water in the pipes), we’re not drinking it.
Good discussion above. I would like to add that the Ion exchange media loses its effectiveness over time (sometimes months). It is a good idea to test your water for hardness once a year to ensure that your media is working correctly.
If the media is no longer effective, the softener controls cant detect it and uses the same amount of salt to regenerate it. This means quite a lot of salt shows up unused in the effluent.
