I am shortly to move to a bungalow that needs a lot of TLC. I want to ensure that we do sometghing to counteract hard water.
It is either a water softener or an inhibitor, Do the latter actually work?
Recommendations please.
TIA
The process isn't inhibition, because the offending material arrives already in the water. And it's your job to do something about it.
"Water softeners are usually regenerated with brine containing 10% sodium chloride.[6] Aside from the soluble chloride salts of divalent cations removed from the softened water, softener regeneration wastewater contains the unused 50 ? 70% of the sodium chloride regeneration flushing brine required to reverse ion-exchange resin equilibria."
In the forward direction, it removes the calcium from the water, and uses up salt in the process. Every once in a while, the resin must be "recharged", by loading salt into it and flushing out the calcium that has collected.
Don't own one, don't know the details.
*******There is also reverse osmosis, which is how the Israelis convert sea water to fresh water. The membranes must be replaced at regular intervals.
Distillation will clean up water, but who wants gobs of calcium in the boiler at the bottom ? Distillation is not microbially clean. Or so our microbiologist told us. He made fun of the stills we were running on the chem lab side of the building, as being "impure". I would expect his had UV or ozone or something for a final step. Since nobody went into his lab, we don't know anything about his setup (not after the sewage incident at least, he had to analyze sewage once, and there was a spill).
Paul
Do you want it for your central heating, your bathroom or your drinking water?
Theo
All I can say is that anything which does not remove it or chemically change it usually clumps it together using magnetic or electrostatic effects which tends to eventually result in very clogged up pipes near that device. I is is nowhere near as effective as filtering. However having said that, being a cheapskate I have left it as is and still need to descale things here in the Thames Water area. I don't recall it ever being as hard as it is these days, and it makes me wonder if its coming from erosion of the big concrete pipes in the London ring. Brian
Your choices are limited to a water softener for where it really makes a difference or accepting a reduced lifetime of kettle elements and immersion heaters. It depends just how hard the water really is.
Only up to a point by making the calcium more soluble but at the risk of corroding the central heating system. Things that make calcium more soluble tend to make iron and copper more soluble too.
Forget about any of the clamp on magnetic bollocks so frequently advertised. They are nothing more than solid snake oil.
Don't buy a Quooker
We have a water softener. The primary reason is to make cleaning the shower room cubicle glass and tiles easier and less frequent.
It doesn't remove 100% of the limescale, but it does improve things considerably.
We still have a hard water tap for drinking water, and filling the kettle etc, I didn't think drinking softened water is a 'long term' good idea ? It certainly tastes crap.
Ditto, ditto and ditto.
Before we had the water softener installed, the Torbeck valve in the upstairs bog would crud up and require a good toothbrushing every
3 or 4 months, but now it runs with no trouble for years!
Spray the wet surfaces with stuff that calls itself "shower shine" (or similar) after showering. (Mr Muscle make one.) Then, the next time you use the shower, first wash the surfaces down with water from the shower head.
You won't need to do a proper wash more often than once or twice a year. (I use Lime Lite to do a proper wash down of the surfaces.)
our water softener is on the feed to our loft storage tank. Drinking water is straight from the main. Kettles get descaled when needed,
Depends a lot on the quality of the water. I recall that a place I used to stay (and indeed my own house before they did away with the private supply) had soft water off a granite catchment that tasted very good.
Officially bad for you and potentially able to dissolve lead pipes but it was a very high quality natural pure water.
We now have Northumbrian water (originally intended for the steel works). It would taste OK if it didn't have so much chlorine in it. It needs to be charcoal filtered to make it pleasant to drink. It is particularly bad at weekends so I suspect they dump a double dose in the holding tanks on the Friday afternoon and none over the weekend.
Real coffee is very sensitive to having just the right amount of water hardness. Too much and you get bitter free base alkaloids and a nasty looking scum on the surface and too little and it is a feeble brew.
Newcastle turns out to have almost perfect coffee making water.
Try it without the filter - the Chlorine will come off just because it's left standing for a while. The Chlorine you can smell isn't in the water, it's up your nose.
I put my finger over the tap to froth up the water as I fill a glass, then just gently blow the Chlorine away.
Utter bollox.
My softener failed. I used shower shine every shower and it didn't really work completely.
Now I have a water softener again and its bliss - the scale in the loos, the plumbing, the water tank and the pipework is gradually dissolving.
And the scale on the taps is going slowly too.
Depends on what you mean by "inhibitor", and "work"!
If you actually want soft water, then an ion exchange softener (or possibly a RO one - but IIUC they are not common in domestic use) are the only ways you will remove the hardness salts from the water.
If all you want to do is stop it depositing on heating elements in combi's and cylinders etc, then a phosphate dosing system will do that to some extent. However it does not actually soften the water, and it will still deposit scale on evaporation - so does not do much to help shower surfaces or taps etc.
The magnetic/electronic ones seem to have little or no effect.
(probably for completeness ought to mention CH system inhibitor - again does not soften water, but does protect the CH system components from corrosion)
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