Bit of an open question I know - but I live in St Albans i
hertfordshire - and we have extremely hard water. This manifest itself in regularly scaled-up shower-heads, kettle etc etc. Whils it's relatively easy to clean the external bit and pieces up, I' concerned that its doing long term damage to bolier, shower valve washing machine and everything else that's not easily dismantlable.
As I plan to stay where we are for some time, what is the best and mos importantly cost-effective way of softening the water?
Full water softeners are expensive and take up space. That leaves:
Phosphor canister descalers (sometimes called CombiMates) Available from B&Q, Homebase around £40-45 They are fitted in-line wity the cold water pipe.They must not supply the drinking water, so a double non-return valve must be used. Canister changed once a year. They tend to have a problem of clogging the venturi holes in the pipe base. Just get a paper clip and poke them on changing the canister. Change once a year.
Wrap around electronic device. These are best just before the heating appliance: combi, cold feed to the cylinder, etc. I have one and it works to around 80-90% of scale removed. These usually come with a 6 months no quibble return policy. So worth getting one and seeing if it works, as they are very simple to fit.
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Fit a proper water softener, top with salt once a month and never have to descale showers, baths, sinks etc again. Also can halve amount of washing powder used and generally soap last longer so save money as well. Well worth the £500 I paid. Doesn't take up too much space either I have mine under the sink in the kitchen.
Seconded, don't stuff about, just get a softener fitted and enjoy the luxury of soft water, you will not regret it, rather like getting an auto washing machine after washing clothes in the sink, or your first dishwasher.
Fit a proper water softener, its the only sure way to go, they are reasonable in price and easy to fit, shop around for salt as this varies in price, interesting you say cost effective, what's your boiler and other appliances worth?
Having tried one in my part of London, I can say it doesn't work.
Perhaps you'd say roughly where you live - given you probably don't know the difference between hard and soft water - so a real expert on here could tell you what type of water you have?
Hint. No shed round here sells 'electronic scale removers' anymore. Perhaps you might ponder why?
If you actually want it softened water, then you only real choice (other than moving!) is an ion exchange water softener. The phosphate dosing carts will stop scale forming to a large extent, but will not actually soften the water, and hence you will get none of the other advantages of soft water like lower detergent use.
The magnetic and electronic "scale inhibitors" are somewhat controversial, there is some evidence that they may have a beneficial effect on recirculating systems, but very little that they are any use on single pass systems. In the cases where people have found benefit from them it seems to be dependant on local factors since the successful experiments are often impossible to reproduce elsewhere.
You will no doubt find a few people who claim success with them, however YMMV.
That's the real clincher - as you plan to stay put for some time the capital cost will really become irrelevant.
N'thed. Even for a bozo like me fitting the Atlantis softener into a kitchen cupboard was so easy I forgave them for the truly naff animation on their Features page (so the plastic lid swivels - wow!). The one query I had while fitting it was answered quickly over the telephone.
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're a few more manufacturer's sites:
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the one that at least one regular on here really likes:
bought a timed one (regenerates at 2 in the morning) with 1200l capacity suitable to a family of 4. But this 1200l capacity assumes a water hardness of 200ppm but is his nearer 400ppm thus only gets about 600l before it runs out, which it often does. He changed the timing to regenerate every 12 hours but then it uses a lot of salt. His uses about 2 25kg bags a month where as my metered (only recharges when necessary) uses about 1/2 - 3/4 a month.
I got mine from
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took a in total a day to fit, but I had to re-arrange kitchen sink waste pipe-work to make room for it.
Mine is a Aquadial Prismertec (part of or a brand of or taken over by, not sure which) Culligan.
I chose this because it is intended for high flowrate systems with minimal pressure drop. I have plumbed it in with hard 22mm pipework all the way from the stopcock to the (large Eco-Hometec) combi and onwards, and to all showers etc "star fed" to minimise the effects of turning various things on and off. For minimum restriction you need to throw away the piddly "washing machine hoses" that come with it and do it in 22mm copper, only beneficial if the softener has big bore internal pipework and resin vessel. This has worked really well, although we are a bit limited by our crappy old 1/2" water main but upgrading that to modern blue 25mm was a project too far.
The Prismertec is also rated for a large family (8-10 "people-days" capacity) and measures usage and adjusts salt dosing appropriately. However their figures for capacity of softened water per day are VERY optimistic. When I first installed it I used to watch the display and its "capacity" indication always seemed to start off at something like "0.98" after regeneration and I assumed that meant about 98% of possible capacity. Generally, if it drops below about "0.50" then it regenerates that night, and it always seems to do this with our usage. It's not THAT bad because it does seem to adjust the salt dosing time so it approximately picks up only the amount of salt needed to regenerate the capacity that has been used rather than the whole resin capacity.
BUT I later discovered that it's a bit of a con. The claimed capacity at preset hardness is 1360 litres. BUT when it went wrong one time I did a lot of Googling and discovered lots of technical data on the valve and controller used in it - the same valve is used in lots of American softeners. As well as revealing how to repair it, it also revealed all the factory settings for use on softeners of many sizes, and it became clear that the "0.98" is actually the capacity in cubic metres which sounds a lot like 980, nowhere 1360, so a bit of a con.
Apart from this, I'm very pleased with it.
... and the way it went wrong was that one of the valve springs broke. Very easy to get a replacement from Culligan to fix it. Interestingly, a colleague has a Prismertec and his went wrong in EXACTLY the same way - same spring, same valve, so may be a bit of a weakness there.
ISTR I paid around £600 for it when they were on promotion at the local plumbers merchant.
Yes you have to watch the capacity thing, luckily my Wizard has two resin containers and re-generates as necessary, just switches resin whilst other one regenerates. You just programme the number of litres before it regenerates. Was supplied set at 600l per tank, but mine is currently set at
320l before regeneration, you can by a 99p water hardness test kit from B&Q to check the output of your softener. Mine was supplying hard water at 340l per tank and soft water when supplying 300l per tank so set at 320l. Mine was £530.
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