My Water Softener Made my Coffee Taste Salty

Can you just imagine, you get up in the morning and start to get your coffee maker set up to start brewing your favorite coffee.  You throw away yesterdays filter, you pour out the unused coffee still in the pot, you rinse it out and from the tap you fill it to that level that makes perfect coffee every time, you get out a filter and put in just the right amount of coffee.  You push the brew button and go hop in the shower and get ready for work.  You return to the kitchen dressed and ready to grab that great tasting cup of coffee, you grab your favorite cup and pour that fresh coffee into the cup and take a sip of nice hot coffee when all of a sudden your taste buds discover a new taste of coffee and spin out of control and you spew that mouth full of coffee into the kitchen sink.

That cup of coffee tasted like salt and has ruined the entire day because you really needed that cup of coffee on that particular morning, actually you need your coffee every morning.  So not only did the day start off wrong but now you know that when you return home you want to figure out why your water tasted like salt

Perhaps this is the solution to the problem;
When the water softener regenerates it takes in all the salt water that is in the salt tank as you know, but what you probably didn't know was that if someone gets up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom while the water softener is drawing the salt water into the water softener tank as you flush the toilet you will bring salt water into the water lines, then you flush again in the morning bringing it even closer to the house or even the toilet.  Then when you rinse out the coffee from yesterdays pot you get salt water into the coffee pot and thus have salty water.  The way you will know if this happened is to go look at your water softener and if it indicates that the water softener regenerated the evening then you know that was the problem.  You will be able to tell if it is a Fleck water softener valve because the white arrow in the upper right side of the valve face on the little transparent dial will be 11 o'clock position under the words "Gallons to Regen"

Or perhaps this is the problem;
Over the past months you have had power outages and when you come home from work or get up in the morning you adjust the flashing clocks throughout the house to set the right time but because the water softener is in the garage or well house it is forgotten and life goes on until that special morning that salt and time collide.  What has happened is that the timer on the water softener has gotten out of time and you begin to draw water into the house in the morning when you use the bathroom and then run the water to wash out yesterdays coffee while at the same time the water softener is in the brine cycle drawing salt water into the water softener to clean the media and salt water is also drawn into the house water lines.

How to remedy the problems;
You can get yourself a Reverse Osmosis System which has its own faucet and gives you bottled water quality water at the sink and avoid the chance of getting up and using the bathroom at the same time as the water softener is drawing in the brine water not to mention having great tasting water for your coffee.
The other way to avoid this is to periodically check your water softener to see that the time is correct and a good time to do that is when you add salt.

There are water softener valves that have small batteries in them to keep the time for situations like these but not very many.  As far as I know the only one that does have one is a Clack valve and I really don't recall that the others have a battery for just such the occasion. 

So if you get salty water don't get mad at your water softener or water softener service man just check your timer on the water softener or follow the instructions above and you'll have your answer.  If what was described here does not match your scenario then perhaps you may want to call your water softener service man.