I have moderately hard water and it would be good to use a water softener. I like the idea of an electronic one that doesn't add chemicals. It descale s the pipes and taps as I understand.
Vulcan 3000 has been recommended to me by my bathroom showroom. It's around £600 and there are cheaper alternatives.
So - how effective is an electronic descaler? Anyone have experiences and v iews?
Just the same as most other sorts of overpriced "chemical free" snake oil sold mainly to separate the worried well from their money.
(not a recommendation)
If you want soft water, you'll need a proper deioniser. And resign yourself to shovelling mountains of salt.
By electronic do you mean the ones which wrap a coil of wire around the mains input and "align the electrons" in the incoming water to prevent scale forming?
If you believe in these I have some very good nearly new Russ Andrews interconnects for a very reasonable price. Oh, and also a bridge in London and a tower in Paris for sale. ;-)
Personal experience? I removed one (probably not a £600 one) from the incoming mains water here and it was all furred up inside the pipe.
We have a salt based system and the difference between this and the electrical system is pronounced. That is, salt works and the electric version doesn't.
Vulcan 3000 looks much the same - wrapped around the incoming pipe and using magic/advance science. Not sure if it leaves traces of bullshit in the water.
Think I recycled the old one; will check the shed.
Cheers
Dave R
So no takers..... I know Russ Andrews products and point well taken.
But tell me more about "furred up inside pipe"....?
Or use block salt, much easier to handle. Yes, it's a little more expensive, but worth it, in my opinion, due to the location of the softener.
"furrer up" means that there are deposits clinging to then pipe walls. In this house, I removed a straight piece of pipe which had been in place for
60 years and I couldn't see through it. Just look inside your kettle.
So this furring up was exactly where the wires were wrapped around the pipe to fit the descaler?
Basically the thing works entirely by convincing people who are afraid of "chemicals" to part with lots of their hard earned cash. You can't blame salesman for flogging them - the bonus per sale must be enormous!
That is a bit surprising unless you live in an incredibly hard water area or one with particulate clay in the supplied water. Mostly a small amount of stuff plates out very slowly over time - except where the water is being heated and then decomposition of the soluble bicarbonate to insoluble carbonate plates out lime mostly on the heating element or the heat exchanger until bits get thick enough to flake off.
Kettle elements being the obvious place where you see it in action.
It was the protective effect of hard water that made lead pipes pretty much inert after a few years. The inside surface coated with lime.
Get a real softener, they last many years and give effective results.
And it's perfectly safe to drink softened water.
We chose not to drink softened water, but instead run a reverse osmosis filter system for drinking water, straight off the hard water supply, we like it and the kettle never gets any scale. The immersion heater element was in full time use for over thirty years until I retired it, still in good order. Washing machine internals are still nearly as new at twenty years old, washing powder use is very low and clothes are soft and keep nice colours, shower head never needs descaling. Bubbles to wash with, the list of advantages go on. I was raised in a house with an ancient permutit softener, and a softener was the second or third luxury item we bought when we got our own house
Once you have experience of mains pressure hot water in a nice tankload, and softened water, you will never go back to header tanks or combis or unsoftened washing water again.
sinmce the [ipe was insstalled in 1911 And I removed it in 1988, I doubt if it even knew what an electric descaler was.
Our water is so hard it's a wonder it comes out of the tap. A (proper ion-exchange) softener was high up the list after we moved in in February. In order to placate the kitchen installer who was muttering about having an unsoftened supply in the kitchen, we have a Triflow tap with hot and cold softened and filtered unsoftened, since not only is it incredibly hard, it's also heavily chlorinated. The filtered stuff is quite palatable, compared to the unfiltered, which is vile. I know it's probably safe to drink, but it was nasty.
Same as here, straight off the mains it smells like a swimming pool.
Some years ago following a lengthy defence here by an ex-supplier of ones using very strong permanent magnets I was sent a couple to try. My neighbour also had an electronic one I removed to experiment with. The test setup was basically a water supply which could be used in once through mode or re circulating. The test device was a kettle modified to stay at 80 deg C. Water either went through it once or could be circulated through it many times. The kettle was cleaned with acid, dried and weighed before each test and dried and weighed afterwards.
The test was conducted using water passing once through the device (the normal situation for domestic installations) and also for the same water circulating through it many times (as found in industrial heating environments (where there are reports that high power magnetic devices seem to have some effect).
Water from an ion-exchange softener was used as a comparator.
The results were :-
Simply heating water (with no softener of any type) caused an increase in weight of the kettle as calcium salts deposited on the element.
The ion exchange softener water gave no change in weight of the test item after the test and no white deposit on the element.
The strong magnet conditioner had no detectable effect on water in a single pass setup, calcium salts were deposited as for the no softener/conditioner.
It had a small and barely measurable effect on the same water circulated through it hundreds of times. A smoother film formed on the element and it was just possible to measure a very small difference in weight change compared with the no conditioner/softener baseline.
The electronic softener had no effect at all in any test, the results were exactly the same as for the baseline no softener with exactly the same increase in weight and noticeable white encrusting deposited.
The Advertising Standards Agency regularly criticise suppliers of electronic conditioners :-
"The ASA understands that no universally accepted theory about how these devices operate and no evidence to support the contention that the devices can inhibit scale formation generally exists.
You have to be joking. If I read you right you expect something with no additives and nowhere for the scale to go to remove these components from the pipe magically? The best I've seen done with such devices is to create a field inside the pipe that clumps the particles together. This then builds up in the pipe and clogs it up. I'd most certainly not spend a penny over a tenner on something like that. What the heck to they claim for over 600 notes? I wonder do they also make them based on the power of a pyramid as well? I think you need to look at what makes water hard before doing anything else. Brian
Or changing expensive cartridges of, um, salt.. and filter materials.
No there is not an easy fix. In my humble view this is a failing of the water industry. We of course have no proof that hard water is harmful, but it does make one wonder that if the taps and pipes scale up in this way, what the heck does it do to the bodys internal plumbing. Look inside your kettle to see how much scale just gets there.
Brian
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