Hello all - I live in a 22 year old house with a water softner that is as old. The unit is set to regenerate every 6 days. We have 4 people in the house, 2 of which are kids under 2.5 years of age (i.e. they don't shower and bath water is minimal, plus, they don't use the toilet yet (I wish they did!) I know the regen cycle took place 2 nights ago. I just tested my hardness today with one of those free-be strips from the big stores and it read a value of 15 GPG - obviously quite hard. I have examined the softner. It is using salt as I would expect. When it goes through its different phases of the regen cycle things seem to be in order. The brine solution is sucked up and run through the beads as I would expect. The brine tank refills to disolve more salt when done, the resin tank is flushed, etc. Yet still hard water. Can a 22+ year old system eventually loose the ability to remove hardness. Do the resin beads wear out.

Thanks!

Yes the resin beads will break down. But let's not jump to conclusions.
There are two scenarios. Give your softener a good shake. These old softeners don't have a very good regeneration and sometimes what happens is that the water will run trenches through the resin at points of least resistance and from then on the water will only go through those trenshes. So right around those ravines get's softened but the whole bed doesn't hence less soft water and that's a bad thing

The next thing to consider is that those resin beads get broken down when they come in contact with Chlorine. Over time the chlorine just dissolves them so that your softening capacity is very much diminished. You can replace the resin and we could get you the resin and a cool little tool that makes it pretty easy to change it out, but I would almost recommend using that to buy a new one that will last you another 20+ years. You can even put it in yourself. If you want some more info let me know.
Have good day