The water comes off the Clackamas River and then through a public water treatment system. I add one bottle of SpaGuard Sentry. After running the pumps and waiting a couple hours, it's off the charts in softness, no Chlorine, Alkalinity is perfect, PH is beyond normal high. In this last go around I've added Chlorine and Calcium (I don't have anything to reduce PH, so I used sodium). By the time I got the hardness to come up into the first category, and PH down slightly, my alkalinity went high.