Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Gotta say, this is a great softener. That said, full satisfaction starts with understanding how water softeners work, and realizing this is NOT a $1000 or more big-name whole house system, but a small, convenient, portable RV-type system, to start with. I mean, it works just as well as a $1000 unit, but you have to manually regen it, and you have to regen more frequently than a large house-sized unit. In a whole house system, you have a seperate brine tank, most likely you have automatic timers or controls to backflush, rinse, etc., and you simply put salt in the brine tank and walk away. Water still too hard, you change the settings on the controller and again forget it. NOT THIS UNIT. You work it, you flush it, you backflush and rinse it YOURSELF. It does require you to manually change over hoses (or to rig up the manifold outside) to do these standard operations yourself. Everyone who gave this unit negative complaints that I saw, made the same complaint - that the orange 'Y' valve broke on them, started leaking, and after they replaced it, that they couldn't get their softness back down to acceptable levels. To them, and to any who would buy this I say, LOOK AT THE ORANGE 'Y' VALVE and notice that white reducer orifice inside one of the openings. That is your regen path to the sewer drop. If your 'Y' valve broke, you STILL have to put that reducer orifice back into the new 'Y' you replace it with, or have to reduce your opening to nearly-nothing, to get backpressure to work the salt in the tank during regen. You can't just run to the store, put any 'Y' there, and make it work. That 'Y' is a serious part of your regen process. Personally, the 'Y' felt solid and decent quality (for plastic) to me, and I would HIGHLY RECOMMEND getting a nice brass Camco pressure reducer to put upstream of your tank, anyhow (since RV parks are KNOWN for using VERY HIGH WATER PRESSURE, like 80-lbs instead of the recommended 45-55 lbs). If water pressure is failing your 'Y', then it is also too high to be going in the tank, or your plumbing, anyhow. REDUCE YOUR WATER PRESSURE! Overall, this system is working great for me. I have now had it inline for over a week, just regen'd it, and it took water in the 700-ppm range down to less than 25 PPM (somewhere less than 1 gpg). I can live with that, my soap suds work again! It is rated at 10,000 grains of hardness. If your water is 142 GPG, that means you can run about 80 gallons of water through it before you have to go through regeneration. If your water is 270 GPG (in the Desert Southwest, yes, it can actually hit this hard - like liquid chalk in your water pipes), then you have about 40-gallons of water before refresh. Again, this is ideal, but when your water is hard, over 100 GPG, even the big name guys will tell you, you will NOT get it down to zero - it's just too hard. As for quality of performance? This thing works like the $1000 big name softener guys' product - as long as you wash, rinse, repeat often - in compliance with just how hard your water is. Trying to run 500-gallons of 250-GPG water through it before regeneration is SURE going to take more than one cycle to clean your styrene tank! Be for real, it is most-likely buried in tons of calcium or magnesium at that point. If you can't get your hardness down after regen, then re-run your cycle again. You still have calcium on your styrene beads in the black tank (the salt rinses those beads, which are ion-positive, which capture the calcium). See, knowing a lot about how something works will take you far in how to diagnose your problems when they happen. I don't know about the test strips that come with it, I've used the aftermarket strips - and again, pretty much any water over 200 GPG is insanely hard, so I only test-strip the 'softened water', and I can get it down to less than 1 gpg (25-PPM) after a regen, so that's awesome. Water super insane hard? Buy two, and run them in series - that will get you down to zero.