One helpful tip is to use high-quality salt pellets rather than rock salt ... You don't want to stop putting salt in your water softener when it's needed and keep the salt above the water level ...

Water softeners filter out heavy metals ... though you’ll actually use regular table salt instead of special softener salt pellets. It takes about 30 minutes to run a regeneration cycle ...

An average softener with 1 cu. ft. of resins (30,000 grain, 10 ” x 44 ” tank) should use about 6-8 lbs. per regeneration to ...