Water softeners ?

[Colin Wilson]

I wouldn't have thought moving 5 miles up the road would make much difference, but in the house we're in now the bogs get quite heavily coated with limescale, so i'm sure all the other plumbing is similarly affected.

What's the current state of play with water softeners - is a reverse osmosis unit better (might have a restricted flow rate ?) or an ion exchange type of unit ?

With an ion exchange unit, the "regeneration" process sounds like it uses shedloads of water - anyone got any idea how often it needs to do this ? (it's a metered water supply)

[The Natural Philosopher]

about once a week, and its probably only 10 liters or so.

If you do it less the water is less soft but still softer than 'raw' towards the end of the cycle.

[Colin Wilson]

Ahh, one I saw said it used something like 320 litres on a regen!

If it did that every night, it'd cost a fortune :-}

[The Natural Philosopher]

I don't have a meter ;-)

It would.

But you have to balance the cost of the salt and the water against the cost of the soap and the damage to plumbing.

A bar of soap in our 'most used' bathroom just ran out.

6 months at least on that one.

AND the bath cleans up with straight water. No scum.

[Pete Verdon]

Mine is a self-metering one, so it does it when it needs to at a random time of day. Having two tanks it can keep supplying water even while regenerating; if it happens to go off while you're in the shower there's a detectable reduction in flow but not major. Because of the random time it's hard to say how often it goes, but certainly more often than once a week.

I'm told that there is a significant difference between softeners for the US market and those in the UK, with the former using considerably more water for regeneration.

Pete

[Dave Liquorice]

If you've just moved are you sure it's not the fact the previous owners weren't very good at cleaning the loo? Took ages to get all the scale of the ones here. We still get "scale" but it's not coming from the water supply.

Biggest indicator is the kettle and how quickly that furs up. They switched our water supply from an adit on the hill half a mile away to Burnhope Resvervoir. The kettle went from a descale once a month to not having a descale in several years, hence knowing that the scale in the loo isn't coming from the water supply...

[Colin Wilson]

It was a repossessed house and had been vacant for over 6 months, and the bogs were *heavily* scaled up - we tried all the usual "max strength" descalers over a period of months and it barely touched it !

We did get them pretty much spotless (one has since been replaced), but the other is now looking horrendous again only a few months after we eventually got it clean.

Incidentally, and it's quite possibly related - the original bog has a tendency to smell "pissy" unless flushed regularly (it was like that when we moved in, and we've removed the floor coverings, scrubbed the floorboards etc.) - I suspect there's limescale around the "upper" parts of the loo that we can't get to :-(

It's not furring up that quickly, but we are detecting some roughness across the element - in the other house we didn't notice any in years...