[Mike Kast]

I have hard well water in my house so I had a Culligan whole house water softener hooked up about 10 years ago. As far as I know the resin needs to be backwashed with salt to be refreshed and that's all. The resin lasts the lifetime of the system and the system has a lifetime guarantee. It replaces 1 part hardness with 1 part salt. The water tastes great but it has trace amounts of sodium and still leaves water spots. Or SALT spots. They wipe off easily but still... salt on the car? You can also use potassium for people on salt restricted diets. that costs about 4 times as much as salt though. I wipe it down as fast as I can. I keep about 3 or 4 towels ready for the dry cycle when I'm washing.
R/O is something I did for a saltwater reef tank I had set up a long time ago. I ran it into a 50 gallon garbage can. This is what I know about R/O...
As far as water purity R/O water is almost as pure as distilled water and may actually be too pure to drink. I heard, and it makes sense to me, that drinking pure water will actually strip your body of necessary vitamins and minerals. I promise you the Culligan man will dispute that but you don't have to be a gynecologist to know where the P&ssy is... The starved water molecules like to be filled with something and they don't really care what it is.
R/O and distilled are also expensive and use a lot of energy to produce. R/O filters work by the filter being constantly cleansed by the water it is cleaning so a large majority of the water being filtered goes down the drain as waste. I don't remember how much but I think it is a ridiculous amount like 10 gallons of waste water for 1 gallon of pure R/O water. To wasteful for my liking. Especially in California.
There is no free lunch fella's.