I try to keep salt in my salt tank full, but sometimes I forget and it runs out. One of my friends told me that's why my water gets bad occasionally. Can running out of salt ruin my water softener?

Keeping your salt tank filled is critical and can not be overstated for the consistent performance of your equipment. The salt provides a brine solution that literally cleans the resin beads in your water softener when it gets dirty from removing the contaminants in your water. If there is no salt, this cleaning process cannot happen, resulting in dirty hard water passing through the system and into your home or business. This seems straight forward enough. What many do not realize is when this happens repeatedly, the resin beads become coated and can no longer be cleaned, which eventually leads to the softener no longer working properly to absorb the dirty hard water. Major service is then required to get the system operating correctly.

If your water company sold you a water softener to remove iron from your water, running out of salt can have the same effect and worse because, the resin will not release the iron. At some point a water softener will become iron bound and stop functioning all together. Iron out salt alone can often, not be enough to clean out all the iron from a water softener especially, if the iron content is above 2 parts per million. With new technology available, it is better to remove the iron before it has a chance to contaminate a water softener.