We have been running a water softener for over 7 years now and it does make a great difference. The water is soft and shower gel etc. foam easily.
However over time the plug hole of the shower bath has built up a white deposit.
Has anyone else experienced this? On line search isn't very helpful.
I assume it may be one of the soluble salts in the water which has become less soluble and slowly built up, but that somehow doesn't seem right.
Cheers
Dave R
I don't run a softener etc but, when I worked in a school in my gap year pre-Uni, one of my duties was to convert tap water to 'pure' water for the science lab. The bit of kit use similar to a water softener as I understand it.
I had to test a sample of the output using a supplied 'kit', if it failed, the softener needed 'regenerating'
I recall this involved 'flushing' process with something- I can't recall exactly what- it was 40+ years back- but I seem to recall lab grade Sodium Chloride was in the mix.
Is there perhaps something in the the softener instructions about regenerating (or even replacing) the chemicals?
The chemicals in the beast I used looked like tiny, round, cod liver oil capsules.
After 12 years my softener ceased working altogether.
If 'Viakal' dissolves the deposit its limescale and you need more salt in your softener, or a new one
Don't think it can be limescale because there is no build up in the kettle and we use softened water.
Also, the water is still soft when using the shower.
The softener is set on the lowest setting but the test kit indicates that it doesn't need to be any higher.
Cheers
Dave R
Actually I thought you had to supply a constant lot of new softener chemicals. One other thing, if the plumbing is old, there will be calcified elements in the pipes past the softener, and some of this can come out as limescale as well over time. Brian
The only chemical needed is salt.
Could have been the Permutit process, where water is passed over a hydrated sodium aluminium silicate, Permutit, and calcium and magnesium ions in the water are exchanged for sodium ions from the Permutit. When all the sodium ions had been used up by ion exchange, the Permutit was regenerated by flushing it with strong brine solution, when the calcium and magnesium that had been absorbed from the hard water were displaced and replaced by sodium from the brine, and the process could then start again.
As the technology developed, the hydrated sodium aluminium silicate ion-exchanger was replaced by a cationic resin, usually a poly-acid such as polyacrylic acid, which is your tiny, round, cod liver oil capsules. They would still have needed to be regenerated at regular intervals, just like their predecessor, as you describe.
So instead of calcium and magnesium chlorides and sulphates in the water, making it 'hard', you ended up with sodium sulphate and sodium chloride in the water, which was 'soft' and didn't make a lot of scum with soap nor did it fur up kettles etc.
For fully demineralised water, as used in laboratories but not necessary for domestic purposes, a two-stage resin process was used. Water was passed over a cation-exchange resin, as above, and the cations, mostly Ca++ and Mg++, were exchanged for H+ ions on the resin. In the second stage the water was passed over an anionic-exchange resin, a poly-amine of some sort, that exchanged SO4-- and Cl- etc for OH- ions on the resin. The resulting hydrogen ions and hydroxyl ions from the two resins then combined to give H2O molecules, and the conductivity of the purified water was extremely low.
But IIRC the resins had to be returned to the suppliers for rejuvenating when they became exhausted and the conductivity of the purified water started to rise.
I can't question your chemistry- it is years since I did any.
As for the rejuvenating process, I remember doing it so perhaps it was another system. This would have been 1975/6 if that helps.
No, what you described is just what I would expect for the cationic-exchange resin system, rejuvenated by concentrated brine when needed. For a school science lab, maybe that's all they needed. At my school, in the late-1950's and in a hard water area in Surrey, the school caretaker had the job of regularly flushing with brine the system that supplied the whole school, but that was before resins became common so was probably original Permutit.
I think a later development of the 'two separate resin' system, was a mixture of the two resin beads in a single container, and when returned to the supplier, they then separated them into the two types for rejuvenation, possibly by density or by flotation, I don't know.
The system I used was just for the science labs. I used to make a batch every week or so and store it in containers.
There's some evidence that you should not use softened water for drinking.
Andy
Skimming the article, reminded me that the resins I remember were Amberlite monobed resins. We used them in the 1970's. Prior to that, every lab/room had a traditional still boiling away in a corner, producing distilled water. A senior member of staff had to confirm to HM Customs and Excise that we weren't using them to distil alcohol, and every once in a while, an HMRC person came to check them. I imagine their demineralising ion-exchange replacements saved a lot in electricity costs.
If it's not removed with descalers, then it's probably Calcium Sulfate, sometimes known as 'permanent hardness'. We have it too.
As far as I can tell, there's no easy chemical way to remove this. We have successfully and gently used wire wool on chromed parts and porcelain. Some say this shouldn't get through the softener, but a small amount does.
To minimise it, get into the habit of mopping up where water drops collect - just a wipe with a cloth can reduce the amount of water and hence eventual scale by (a guess) a factor of a hundred.
Getting it off resin shower trays is trickier because obviously you want to avoid scratching. Ive done it once, but now we squeegee this after use - a soft silicone squeegee is much kinder than a window cleaner's hard squeegee. Before we move I'll probably go over it again with wire wool, or maybe some sort of buffing disc with maybe chalk.
Reducing the amount of evaporating standing water is key.
yep. Teh less than one teaspoonful of sodium t in a gallon is reckoned to be far more harmful that eating half a bag of crisps
Thanks.
Very useful information.
Cheers
Dave R
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