Just like your car, if there’s no fuel in its tank, it won’t run. Think of a brine tank as a fuel tank and salt as the fuel. This brine solution is then drawn into the media tank where it rinses and cleans the media, sending all of the captured hardness minerals to the drain, making the resin ready to do its job again.
When the resin media inside of the water softener becomes too full of hardness minerals and cannot capture any more, the brine tank fills with water and soaks the salt, dissolving it to form a brine solution. To know what can happen to your softener and home if your brine tank runs out of salt, it’s important to first understand how a brine tank works. What happens to your water softener if you forget to add salt? Are there better ways to remind you to check the salt levels in your tank? Running Out of Salt But, with life being as hectic as it often is, it can sometimes be difficult to remember to add another bag of salt to your brine tank. If you’re a water softener owner, you are likely familiar with the routine of dumping bags of salt into the short tank next to your softener. While a water softener requires very little maintenance or monitoring for it to continue to deliver consistently soft water, it does require regular additions of softener salt to its brine tank. That’s a lot of responsibility for one appliance! Whether you’re showering, drawing a pot of water for cooking, or filling a cool pitcher for lemonade, all of the water that you use in your home needs to first pass through your softener.
Your water softener works diligently all day long to remove the minerals that make up hard water.