Aquasana SimplySoft® 40,000 Grain Water Softener - Whole House Hard Water Reduction - Base Tank & Cabinet System WH-SF40-BASE

After using the Aquasana SimplySoft 40k grain water softener for six months, I’m really happy with the results. For the price, the quality is excellent—our water feels noticeably smoother, and there’s far less scale buildup on faucets and appliances. Installation does require some basic plumbing skills, so it’s not exactly a plug-and-play setup, but once it’s in place, it’s incredibly easy to use. The clean/regen cycle runs smoothly and doesn’t need much attention. Overall, a great value system that works well without all the maintenance hassle of traditional softeners. Would definitely recommend.

This is a very good product! The installation went pretty smoothly. Living in the country, I thought water always left a white residue on a black sink. After installing the water softener, I find that's not the case. No residue when the water dries up . Plus, the first thing I did after installation was set out a container of water to see if it turns brownish after a couple of hours from my dissolved iron ( ferris iron) in the water. Nope, perfectly clear. Excellent product at an excellent price.

I got this to replace an existing, nonfunctional whole-house water filter left behind by a previous owner. I wanted to get rid of it and then reduce the hardness of our water by installing a water softener. I invested a significant amount of time researching various brands' softeners, and decided to go with this Aquasana 40,000 grain unit because of the company's good reputation with water filters and long time in business. Water softeners are a new product line for them, and it can be a bit difficult to navigate their website to find the information about them. Once you do, the site is helpful. One frustration during my research was that posted specifications for different companies' softeners do not provide much (if any) information about drain lines, other than assuming a handy floor or wall drain will be available in places like basements and garages. In my case, there is no drain in our garage, which I suspect is not unusual. Plus, the entry point of my house's city water line is pretty far from the nearest laundry drain located just inside the house. This meant that I had to ensure a given softener could support a drain pipe with a 6' vertical rise to the garage's ceiling plus another 40' over, around a few corners and back down to a pass-through to the laundry drain. Aquasana's installation manual mentions that a 7' vertical rise would work, and that any distance of more than 20' should use 3/4" pipe. But there was no indication of a distance limit beyond 20', so I took a chance and ordered this system. I decided to use PEX-B 3/4" pipe for the drain line. I also made sure that the pipe ran slightly downhill from the top of the 6' vertical run through the rest of its 40' distance, such that it's about 2.5" lower than the ceiling at the point where it drops vertically to the wall's pass-through. I believe gravity helps reduces the reliance on water pressure alone (65 psi in my case) to keep the drained water moving along. By the way, if you need to use PEX pipe, I strongly recommend buying 10' straight "sticks" of pipe with couplers instead of one long coiled pipe, as the sticks are SO much easier to work with. I used SharkBite pipes and couplers, which worked great - no leaks.) Installing the new softener was straightforward. But I will say that the instruction manual, which Aquasana's support people told me is only available online, differs somewhat from the installation video you can watch online. For example, the manual warns you to not use the included silicone lubricant on the O-ring that seals the control unit's joint with the tank, but the video tells you to do this. Which is right? I used it and was careful not to tighten it too much. The manual and video also differ in the amount of teflon tape you should use on the main inlet/outlet fittings, so I used five turns. Oddly, the manual also says the AC outlet that powers the control head can't be more than 6' away. Why? I know a thing or two about electricity, and there's no good reason I can think of that a longer, good quality extension cord that's not exposed to water can't be used. It works just fine. I knocked off a star for not having a printed manual included with the softener, as you really must have one handy to guide you throughout the many installation steps. The support person I talked with about this said that they are an "online company", so they don't include printed materials with their products. Sorry, but this makes no sense to me. If I have to print one out myself, I'm using at least the same amount of paper and ink to do so, if not more. I decided to use an iPad instead, but was worried about dropping it or dropping tools and parts on it, as well as handling it with water or lubricant on my hands. A printed manual really is a must with a project like this. The blue tank is quite heavy, so I strongly recommend using a hand truck with fastening straps to move it any distance. I would not recommend trying to carry it anywhere, as this could cause an injury and/or possible damage to the tank. I used SharkBite flexible/bendable lines to connect the softener tank to my 3/4" copper water inlet and outlet pipes. The push-to-connect (PTC) fittings on these flexible lines require very clean and deburred copper pipes, so I used a deburring tool I got from Amazon and an emery cloth to thoroughly clean the ends where I cut the pipes. The SharkBite PTC fittings work very well if you take the time to get the pipes nice and clean - no leaks whatsoever in my case. Getting the system ready for use requires some initial flushing steps to prevent pipe shavings and other contaminants from entering the main tank. The instructions tell you to run the rinse cycle twice for some reason, which you do by rotating the main rotary dial until you get to the "rinse" step. In my case running it twice filled up the adjacent brine tank with too much water. If I were to do it again, I would only run the initial rinse cycle once. After setting the time of day, programming the control head is very simple. You enter the date, the hardness of your water in grains (if you have a measured parts-per-million number instead of grains, divide the PPM number by 17.1 to get the correct number in grains) and how many people live in the house. That's pretty much it. I then ran a manual regeneration cycle to make sure everything was working properly and to verify there were no leaks anywhere. Once this cycle finishes about an hour or so later, the control head will tell you how many gallons of softened water will be used before the next cycle will automatically run some number of days - depending on water usage - in the future, at the default time of 2:00 AM. In other words, the control head doesn't measure hardness - it simply keeps track of water usage based on the parameters you enter, and then regenerates once the remaining water usage hits the target on the display. My 45' drain line is working quite well with 3/4" PEX-B pipe, which I'm happy about. The system is very quiet when doing a regen cycle, which has not always been the case with previous softeners I've used. Nice! I'm using 40 pound sacks of salt crystals in the brine tank, as I read somewhere that they are less likely to create salt bridges than pellets over time. I'm not sure if that's true or not, but I figured there's no downside to using crystals, so why not? In summary, everything seems to be working well, and I would recommend this system. If you're lucky enough to have a drain and AC outlet conveniently located where you'll be installing the system, it should be a relatively simple, 2-4 hour job to get everything connected and running. My 45' drain line took much more time to install than the actual softener system, but that's not Aquasana's issue. Sorry for the long review - I hope it's helpful to anyone considering this system. The friendly and helpful Aquasana support people I talked with answered a few questions, and I think the company does care a lot about its customers - a good sign that they'll be around for a long time.

Worked as advertised. Easy installation and turn up. Soft water in the house now is awesome!

Great value for the money, easy to install, working well

Solved my hard water problem. Spent hours at Home Depot trying to get pieces necessary to hook up to my water lines. I'm not a plumber but with a little help from home depot I got it installed

We were missing parts: the pre filter and related hardware and so our install has to be rescheduled. Aquasana does have a list of plumbers familiar with their products on their website. We submitted pictures of the unit and a copy of receipt to company on 1/9. We are waiting for a response.

We’ve been using this for about 6 months and I feel a difference, my son who suffers from eczema his skin has cleared up, and so has mine. My hair is softer way less frizz, and as soon as I get out the shower I’m not itching everywhere. I truly love this system, the installation was quick, easy to set up the settings, and all you need is to buy the salt, so far we haven’t had any issues, it’s very good quality, one of my favorite YouTubers recommended it (healthnutnutrion) and I’m so glad I bought it!