Potassium chloride as a water softener?

Has anyone used potassium chloride as a water softener in their cannabis grows? If yes, can you please share your experience and knowledge?
Any information you know could be useful, even the smallest detail could be helpful. I tried googling and many articles say it's safe for plants, but i didn't find actual results and first-hand experiences from cannabis growers, no grow diaries or journals with it. Not even journals for other plants, just articles that say it's safe for plants.
But i want to know all the pros and cons, how to properly use it, how much, are there different types of potassium chloride, can you get potassium excess with it, does the salt hurt the soil bacteria etc. literally anything that comes to your mind please!

In my area the water is very hard, pH 9 and ppm 450. I always have limescale everywhere that builds up quickly. My plant seems to have a calcium lockout and she isn't taking potassium and magnesium, regardless of how much i add in the correct pH range. Even flushing the soil didn't help. I may have made it worse with adding supplements and stimulants which i won't do for my next grow, but still i would like to soften my water for the future. I'd rather have to use Calmag to correct deficiencies than having a nutrient lockout. And maybe this would explain why all my seedlings are very dark green with slow growth and minor clawing, even when i add just a little bit of water in a light-mix soil.

At this moment i can't use an RO system due to stealth reasons, i live with my family and i'm trying to keep my grow lowkey. And also i've invested too much money into other equipment already so an expensive RO unit will have to wait for another time.
Rainwater is also out of the question because it rains only a little bit during the whole year.
Dehumidifier water is also a no go, because i would have to run a dehumidifier for several days to collect enough water for plants, even with a capacity of 1L/h.
The only other option for me would be to buy large amounts of distilled water or store-bought drinking water and mix, but that will be too much to deal with.
So this is why i think potassium chloride could be the perfect solution for me, if it really works like they say.
Or maybe some small filter that i can attach to the sink? If this would work, then you can suggest me some filter also.

I can't get proper water analysis for my area either. I live in a very small city that's almost like a village, and there isn't an official water analysis report for my city. We take water from 3 different reservoirs and they interchange so we always have different water. When looking at the analysis of those 3 reservoirs, every element seems to be in normal range, but in reality the limescale in the house is too extreme and way above average. The water municipality doesn't reply to emails, and phone calls are useless because nobody knows or cares enough about our small town. Even if do somehow get a water analysis, i doubt it would be accurate because for all i know it could be old from few years ago or a false one. Yes it's a problem in my country and town but that's another subject.

Thanks for reading and sorry for the long post, i just wanted to throw it all out there so you know my situation, and i want to find good alternatives to RO.

You still need a water softener system. You don't just add potassium chloride to your water. You can just use that instead of sodium chloride.

KCl can also be used to make your own pH pen storage solution.

xtsho said:

You still need a water softener system. You don't just ad potassium chloride to your water. You can just use that instead of sodium chloride.

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So is it not just a powder or a pellet that you add to water? At least that's what i found when searching about it. I just found out recently about it so maybe i didn't search enough, but all the products seem to be powders in small packages.

Wow you're right, i feel like a big dumbass now. Those powders and pellets were just to refilling the system. And the system is even bigger than an RO system. I completely missed this part.. Back to the drawing board i guess.

OM2 said:

So is it not just a powder or a pellet that you add to water? At least that's what i found when searching about it. I just found out recently about it so maybe i didn't search enough, but all the products seem to be powders in small packages.

Wow you're right, i feel like a big dumbass now. Those powders and pellets were just to refilling the system. And the system is even bigger than an RO system. I completely missed this part.. Back to the drawing board i guess.

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No you don't just add it to your water. If you did that you would raise the ppm. It's used as a regenerant in a water softening system.

"What is regenerant used for?
Before we talk about the differences between sodium chloride and potassium chloride, it’s important to understand what regenerant is in the first place. During the water softening process, water goes into the softener’s tank and encounters thousands of tiny resin beads. These beads have either sodium or potassium ions attached to them, depending on the type of regenerant your system uses.

When hard water comes into contact with the resin beads, the calcium and magnesium ions (hardness minerals) in the water attach to the beads and “knock off” the sodium or chloride ions that were previously attached to the beads. The sodium or chloride ions flow out of the tank with the (now softened) water, while the hardness minerals are left behind.

The process above happens over and over until most of the resin beads in the tank are covered in ions from hardness minerals. At this point, a solution of water and either sodium chloride or potassium chloride, known as regenerant, is flushed into the tank. When this happens, the hardness minerals are so overwhelmed by the regenerant that they detach from the resin beads and are flushed out of the tank."

Thanks for your time, i'll look for other solutions then.

Apart from RO, my next option would be to try the Trio Flora Hard Water nutrients by Terra Aquatica, previously known as General Hydroponics.