Depends on the water report your city offers.What is the quality of this water, suitable for the garden? Sorry if you already said.
Because our water comes into the slab of the house, but I don’t know what it does after that, without a lot of taking walls apart which I’m not going to do. I know it pops out of the floor, on the opposite side of the house (bathroom) and I see no way to easily figure out the flow of the water to catch it all of it with a water softening system, without placing a unit outside the house next to where it enters. Waste water, if it is suitable could be routed to my front plant beds or I could tie it into the pool overflow drain which dumps onto the street.
Typically what it is is filtered tap that isn't RO yet and mixed with some backwash that never made it into the loop. Assume higher dissolved minerals but less chlorine content. You can drink it but it's not something you'd want to for a long time due to the issues higher mineral content water can cause over time. You can water the lawn or garden with it. Or dump it into your pool.
Salt conditioners pose problems down the line for irrigation and pool intake. You have a lot of options at your disposal from non-chemical conditioning (giant filter similar to RO, salt water (region or fixture specific) and whole house RO. If you've got questions about the whole house units, I'd suggest finding an independent water store in your area and going in to talk with them. They'll be running commercial sized units but they can give you the rundown on what to expect and how much waste water they produce. The better the system, the higher its efficiency percentage. The higher the percentage, the less waste.
In other words, it's the difference of wasting 6 gallons of water to make 1.5 usable gallons versus wasting one gallon of water to make 7 gallons of usable water. Obviously you pay more for better stuff, but what price you buy into saves you money on your water bill.
Check with a contractor/plumber and see what you can get through your members only discount program that you brought up in the other thread. You could probably score a system for much cheaper than what anyone else can.
If it was me, I'd do the salt setup to the heater tank or tankless system only. It makes more sense from an environmental point of view and how minerals present themselves. I'd run an RO unit at the kitchen sink because a whole home RO unit means everything is RO, including your toilet water. There are ways to keep certain fixtures from drawing said water but it adds unnecessary complexity to everything.
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