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My water is 600ppm on the water hardness scale so I am going to install a water softener figured I'd grab the main water line before it hits anything besides the sprinklers and plumb in the whole softener system.

But a lot of houses I've seen all have RO filters in the kitchen or whole house with softener. Do I need that or is it just unnecessary? Like my mom has a softener and a RO filter but I drink her tap water and it tastes fine and it's not RO that tap is right next to the sink tap.

So can I save some money and not install a filter? Or perhaps just one of those canister filters immediately after the softener tank ya know the screw out bottom with the round filter inside ones?

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Typically one might want an RO filter to remove excess sodium (which comes from the water softener replacing calcium, etc, with sodium) from the water one drinks, and/or due to additional pollutants/contaminants in the well water not otherwise removed, which primarily matter to water one drinks or cooks with; but not so much to water you shower or flush with.

With that much hardness, the softener output may well have enough sodium to be a concern, though that can also vary with health conditions making excess sodium a particularly problematic issue for some people.

An alternate solution, if hardness is the only issue, is to provide unsoftened cold water to the kitchen sink, or to only soften the supply to the water heater.

Canister filters do different things depending what media is put inside them. Removing sodium is not typically one of those things.

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    I set an extra cold water tap in the kitchen just for hard water. My wife uses it for watering a million plants that would suffer horribly on soft water. The RO is routed to the refrigerator, which makes for mucky ice cubes (the RO puts minerals back in after it removes them), but cold drinking water. You may want to leave your outside taps off the soft stuff, too. Outside things don't care for soft water, either.
    – RG Hughes
    Commented Dec 22, 2023 at 20:15

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