Seems a water softener fail after six months shouldn't be your cost to bear (unless you installed it yourself). Two years ago this week, we lost our water heater abruptly, in slightly amusing fashion. A local company had been running a special for replacing your water heater with a tankless one, which we'd been considering anyway. This was during September, when I'm always up-to-here with new school year work, so I asked the SO to make the call. He put it off, and put it off, and put it off. On the last day of the promotion, he sent an email to the company, and then still wasn't sure. Then he went to take a shower after a jog and found no hot water. He felt motivated after that. Fortunately, we only went without for a few days. Parts of the old water heater actually disintegrated (leaving a trail of rust in our driveway) as the installers took it out to their truck for disposal.