Plumber's Snake Oil?

It's something to do with money changing hands, perhaps?

The general scientific opinion is that it's bollocks. The practical experience of some people is that they seem to work. YPYMAYTYP

Its amazing how quantum entangled money is.

Its movement can affect physical laws.

See also renewable energy climate change GM crops..

All crops are genetically modified.

If it comes to it, so are we.

Owain

When I moved to this area, a fellow sceptic (geophysics PhD) said that, in fact, magnets seemed to stop his kettle furring (the scale just settled in a loose gritty layer). I tried one and it seemed to work too. Then I moved house (but just across the road) and there it didn't seem to work the same. YMMV.

And all crops are organic, come to that.

Well they cause significant RFI as well. All I can tell you is that a friend had one for some years, what happened was the pipe where it was mounted ended up clogged up with limescale. From what I can tell they attempt to use either magnetism or electrostatic charge to make the lime scale clump together into larger blobs. It obviously cannot remove it since there is no mechanism to do so, and so its still there. You can judge for yourself what is going to happen. its probably either going to not work at all, do what my friends did and clog the pipe locally or distribute itself around your plumbing. I see problems in the future either way. I'd not touch one with a ten foot pole. Brian

Yes certainly, I think in a house with high water pressure it will have little effect, the lower the pressure the more it will simply clog up pipes until something goes wrong. Then the scale will just return but your pipes aware probably scaled up. It also depends on the makeup of the actual calcium or bits of old concrete and plastic in the water, and since there is no way to get the clumped stuff out its just going to go to the nears place it can lodge all clumped together. I personally feel that water treatment plants are the place where water should be made limescale free if you believe that is more healthy. Bah humbug. Brian

Subject drift alert. This I thought was his very large footer so I ignored it. Brian

Read my two messages though, the side effects can be worse than the problem. Incidentally way back when the old Tomorrows World was on somebody reckoned they had designed heating elements for immersion heaters and kettles that actively repelled the limescale, thus stopping the main reason for them failing due to being insulated, thermally from the water they were supposed to heat. Strange then that most heaters still look like they always did and still scale up. Could it possibly be the idea was a dud? Surely not! Brian

Yes see the replies I gave earlier. It may appear to work but the where has it gone is very significant I think. Brian

There are suggestions that the magnetic field influences the traces of iron in the water, and that this in turn influences the mode of crystallisation of the calcium carbonate, from being normal calcite to aragonite. But until someone does some well controlled laboratory experiments to prove it one way or another, it'll remain something of a mythtery.

Clamping a couple of neodymium magnets from an old hard drive onto the rising main is probably the easiest way to do it at home, at minimal cost, so it doesn't matter if it doesn't work.

On 08 Jul 2019, Chris Hogg wrote (in article snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com):

As is all food.

Apart from, say, your CH heating system all the water will come out of the tap or down the bowl when you flush the loo. If the limescale remains in solution rather than sticking to the pipes then there is always a method of removing 100% of it. Applying snake oil in the form of a weak magnetic field may not achieve this.

They prevent scale deposition very effectively in soft water areas. Anyone remember the protracted debates about magnetic water conditioners? I believe,ADAM/IMM was a great fan of them.