The most common disadvantages of water softeners

Water softeners equipped with filters do remove limescale from the water. This is an advantage if you always want softer water. Other benefits are mainly indirect, such as less washing away of soap products and the reduction of your CO2 emissions. On the other hand, there are many disadvantages to using water softeners, for example for your wallet.

The question now is whether the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.

Water softener costs

The first potential pitfall is the water softener price you pay for having a water softener with filters. Make no mistake about the costs. In addition to the purchase costs, you pay a lot of money for maintenance and kilos of salt. All in all, the purchase amount can amount to € 2100, with € 175 in annual costs.

Purchase and installation

Water softeners with filters are not cheap. For a decent copy you pay between €1000 and €1800. For this amount the water softener is delivered, but not yet installed. The installation costs are usually around € 275. The technician must also connect the complete system to a drain or sewer. This takes a lot of time and costs money.

Maintenance

A water softener that works with salt requires annual maintenance. The maintenance technician will come to clean the filters, carry out any repairs and refill the salt. This is an annual cost of approximately € 125. This amount increases if your water softener requires multiple repairs and the technician takes longer. Maintenance must be carried out every year, otherwise you will still suffer from hard water after the investment has been made.

Refill salt

You will need to replace the salt in the system more often than once a year. The maintenance technician will top up the salt if necessary, but you must obtain salt yourself to keep the system running properly. You must top up with salt every 8 weeks. You can purchase salt for €12.50 per 25 kilos. A household of four people requires 100 kilos of salt per year. Annually you spend around €50 on salt for the water softener system.

Overload water softener system

Perhaps the deepest pitfall is the sound. Many people underestimate the noise that water softeners make. Water softeners that you cannot program switch on at random times to soften water and prepare it for consumption. Once switched on, a water softener produces a lot of noise. This causes nuisance during the day if the system is in or close to the living area. It disrupts your sleep at night, causing you to get out of bed broken in the morning. In addition, a water softener system takes up a lot of space, space that you may not have or cannot spare. So make no mistake about the size and noise that the water softener system produces.

Do not set hardness

To get the most out of a water softener, you must set a residual hardness. If you set the wrong residual hardness, the system may not soften the water properly. Setting the hardness is not difficult, but finding the right residual hardness is. The water hardness varies per municipality and is often not even fixed. You need a lot of patience to find the right residual hardness, because you can't test the water until the system turns on and processes water.

Weighing the advantages and disadvantages of water softener

For a water softener to work optimally, a lot of maintenance, time and money is required. We have listed the most common disadvantages and potential pitfalls to make you aware of the amount of work that goes into operationalizing a water softener system. The advantage of removing limescale and the indirect benefits do not outweigh the disadvantages of a water softener with filters. There are too many disadvantages to using a water softener system.

Go for the Amfa4000®

Our self-developed alternative to a water softener, the Amfa4000®, has none of these disadvantages and is a lot cheaper. For a one-off fee of €159, the softener will be delivered to your home the next day. You simply install the softener on the existing pipe. The Amfa4000® ensures that hard algonite, which you know as limestone, no longer forms. This anti-limescale system does not remove the minerals calcium and magnesium from the water, but changes the crystal structure so that they no longer precipitate. The best part is that the system is maintenance-free and environmentally friendly.
The Amfa4000® is our self-developed anti-limescale system and has many advantages for such a small system. The magnetic fields of 1600 Gauss ensure that the crystal structure changes, so that these minerals no longer precipitate. The system does not remove limescale from the water, but suppresses the negative effects when the water flows. Read more about the influence of the number of Gauss in water softeners here.