Salt-Free Hard Water Media

Salt-free hard water conditioning media is growing in popularity as a means of treating hard water to prevent mineral scale formation without requiring a salt-based regeneration. While some people refer to this technology as a salt-free water softener, this terminology is not accurate as this technology does not soften the water. It does not remove the minerals. Instead, the technology focuses on preventing mineral scale formation on surfaces in the plumbing system, and it is very effective at that. By doing so, this technology provides most of the benefits of a water softener but without the salt. Salt-free hard water conditioning media use a technology most often referred to as Template Assisted Crystalization (TAC) although some manufacturers refer to it by other names such as Nucleation Assisted Crystalization (NAC). Regardless of the difference in name, these technologies work the same way and the media are generally interchangeable (although not necessarily of equal quality/perforamnce). Salt-free hard water conditioning media can be loaded into traditional media tanks, or used in cartridge form. Only a small amount of media is needed (generally about 1L can treat 3-4 gallons per minute of flow rate with appropriate fluidization of the media bed and contact time. Systems are run in upflow to fluidize the media bed and effective treatment only requires a few seconds of contact time. In addition to point of entry water treatment for residential and commercial applications, TAC media is commonly used to protect tankless water heaters, boilers, and high end appliances in point-of-use applications as well. By far, our top selling TAC media is ScaleStop from Next Filtration.