valve between hose bib supply - softened and untreated

The hose bib take-off from the city raw water is only 6 feet from the filter/softener outlet. Shouldn't I join them with a full port three way valve to be able to select softened water at my hose bibs for washing the car, windows, skylights, etc?

Would I be hopelessly optimisitic to think occasionally filling the hose bib copper pipes with softened water would have any effect on scale? They're new, not scaled yet.

Washing anything in softened water is preferable to washing it in hard water.

It will take decades for your hard water to put down enough scale to cause any problem.

Yea, go ahead and run the bypass.

Why not simply install a couple of new hosebibs with hot and cold soft water? I have hosebibs with four different water types; raw unfiltered well water, iron filtered/unsoftened, iron filtered/softened hot and iron filtered/softened cold.

LLigetfa said:

Why not simply install a couple of new hosebibs with hot and cold soft water? I have hosebibs with four different water types; raw unfiltered well water, iron filtered/unsoftened, iron filtered/softened hot and iron filtered/softened cold.

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Switching the hose bibs with a valve at the raw water junction is 6 feet of plumbing. You're suggestion is about 100 feet, although admittedly very convenient.