The Super Official Homeowners Thread

[Steve85]

Ah, gotcha. Yeah, that makes sense now about the toilets teeing off the bathroom line, and the wear on the valves.
I need to spend some time nerding out on specs and sizing. We avg about 4000 gal/month (which seems crazy when I say it out loud) so I'll want to find a system that can process that amount with out me refilling it every other day.  

Since the house has ~12 years of hard water through the copper, should I look at flushing the pipes with some CLR or something? I'm on town water and we don't really seem to have pressure issues, so maybe it isn't worth it.

I don't think I've ever heard of flushing pressure pipes, mostly just soaking shower heads and cleaning faucet strainers, you're probably OK. 

The softener holds something like 200lbs of salt, definitely no need to fill every day! It will need to "recharge" on a schedule but you don't have to do anything for that, it runs automatically.

You should be able to access a water quality report from your provider with the water hardness (we're 18.5 grains per gallon (GPG)). Then, find an online calculator and put in your water usage and hardness and it'll tell you what size softener you need. Keep in mind though, although the water heater looked bad, if you had really hard water for 12 years, you'd probably have issues with other things too like heavy spotting on glasses, inside of the dishwasher completely white with deposits, heavy deposits on shower heads, etc.