Hard water is the result of excessive minerals in your water. While hard water is a common issue, it’s also a serious one. Hard water can ruin your appliances, irritate your skin, and leave your clothes dirty even after they’ve been washed. Fortunately, you can use a water softener to remove minerals from your water.
Atlantic Blue Water Center offers top notch water softeners to homes and businesses across Maryland. Before going into more detail about water softeners, let’s first review hard water.
Understanding Hard Water
As already mentioned, hard water is caused by excessive mineral content in your water. Calcium and magnesium are the two most common minerals that cause hard water. Ferrous iron and some other minerals can also cause hard water, however.
When groundwater flows over limestone, calcium, magnesium, and other minerals, it absorbs these various minerals. Eventually, these minerals make their way to your home and can build up in your water heater and elsewhere.
How Hard Water Can Affect Your Home and Health
Hard water produces scale, which is a hardened buildup of minerals. This scale can attach to the heating element in your water heater, reducing its conductivity and potentially damaging the water heater itself. This could result in expensive repairs or force you to replace your water heater.
Hard water can also damage your clothes, washing machine, and dishwasher. Your washing machine and dishwasher are connected directly to your water supply, meaning scale could build up in your appliances, causing clogs.
Further, hard water prevents soap from sudsing properly. In fact, one of the most common signs of hard water is ineffective soap. Hard water will leave your dishes and clothing dirty even after you wash them.
While you could turn to bottled water for drinking water, when you take a shower, the calcium and magnesium will irritate your skin and could cause your hair to turn brittle.
Softening your water will prevent all of the above and more.
How Water Softeners Work
As you can see, excessive amounts of minerals in your water can be dangerous to your health and home. A water softener can be used, however, to remove those minerals from your water. This will leave your water purer and with better mineral levels.
The water softening ion exchange process is a bit complex. Basically, positive ions of salt (Na+) are dissolved into your water. The salt then exchanges ions with the calcium and magnesium, creating free salt particles.
Meanwhile, the calcium and magnesium particles, which are now combined with ions of salt, will stick to a resin specially designed to attract them. This prevents them from entering your water supplies.
How Softened Water Benefits Your Home and Health
Once your water has been treated by a water softener, mineral levels are reduced dramatically. This means you don’t have to worry about scale build
up in your water heater, washing machine, dishwasher and more. The water will be much purer.
Not only does this protect your appliances, but dishes will come out of the dishwasher cleaner, and clothes will come out of the washing machine cleaner as well. Soap will start to suds better, increasing its cleaning effectiveness.
You also don’t have to worry about calcium and magnesium irritating your skin or making your hair brittle.
Many water softening filtration systems are “whole house”, meaning the water is treated when it reaches your home and before it’s distributed to showers, washing machines, and the like. This means you can enjoy clean water in the shower, kitchen, and wherever else.
In other words, with the right water softening system, you can enjoy clean, pure water throughout your home! Contact us by calling 410-840-BLUE (2583) or 866-380-BLUE (2583) today to learn more about our softeners!