Hello!!!
I read your article on “the straight dope” that was put on the net last week. My concern is that I have a water softener and I use Potassium Chloride as a softening agent rather than Sodium Chloride.
The product is manufacture by IMC 8300 College Boulevard, Overland Park, KS 66210. Do you know anything on this particular product? I am killing everybody here with it? After reading your material I am quite concerned and every bit of info would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you for your help.
The KCl (or NaCl, for that matter) isn’t actually used for softening. It is used by a “recharge” cycle run every few days (usually at 2:00 AM) to recharge the complicated molecule that actually does the work. No significant amount of KCl should be getting into your water, and it is (obviously) not a cumulative poison.
You should use whatever the manufacturer of your water softener says you should be using.
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http://www.straightdope.com/columns/991217.html
Potassium chloride(KCl) is really a killer. A pharmaceutical company, whose name i don´t remember sure enough to post it here, left some 10 cc bottles of potassium chloride in the labeling machine, while preparing to label Sodium chloride bottles of the same shape and color. As sodium chloride is often used to dissolve other drugs, a nurse used these bottles on a pediatric intensiv care unit. KCL is usually provided as a 7,45 % preparation, so she gave the baby 7,45 * 10 cc /100 = 745 mg (7,45% KCl results in 1 mol/l), so this was 10 mmol. An adult patient would probably have survived this dosage, but two babys died before someone found out the case. Two adults some years earlier didn´t survive a nurses mistake when she dissolved antibiotics with 100 cc KCl 1 mol/l instead of Nacl 0,9% when grasping the wrong bottles out of the shelf where they were placed next to one another.
Stefan´s first law of life: Don´t do anything you don´t like that good that nobody else performs better