Benefits of Water Softening
Eliminates scale
Rainwater is naturally soft. It becomes hard after flowing through chalk and limestone and dissolving some of the calcium carbonate. As hard water evaporates or is heated, it deposits scale. Scale is a familiar sight:
- In your kettle or shower head
- As the white stain in the toilet bowl
- As speckling on shower screens
- As a smear on newly washed windows and cars
This is because more than 40 kg of chalk arrives each year in the hard water used in an average home.
Spend enough money on limescale busting cleaning fluids and you can normally shift it. That is if you remember to spray your shower screen after every shower! But what about the surfaces that you can't see to clean? Maybe you use Calgon to protect the heating element of your washing machine. But what about your hot water boiler and your pipes? As well as having a much shorter working life, New Mexico State University showed that they become 25% less efficient as they clog up with scale.
Prevents scum
As well as depositing scale, hard water chemically interferes with almost everything that it touches. When you see scum on the surface of your cup of tea or coffee, you know that it won’t taste as good. But did you know that it also makes cooked vegetables taste tough and rubbery?
Easier cleaning
And what about all that extra time spent cleaning? Researchers at Ohio State University found that homeowners with hard water spend an extra 1.5 hours per week on cleaning. That's an extra 80 hours per year.
Soft skin, soft hair, soft laundry
Hardness makes water more aggressive - so aggressive that it strips the natural oils out of your skin. It then deposits a layer of difficult-to-rinse-off scum over your skin's pores, which doctors believe is the reason why many more people in hard water areas report problems with dry and irritable skin, rashes and eczema.
Exactly the same is true of your hair, which hard water leaves brittle, stiff and dull. Top hairdressing salons know this and soften their water.
Even your laundry suffers because, in spite of having to use twice as much detergent with hard water, whites go grey, colours fade and textiles bobble. With soft water clothes and linen are luxuriously soft and look new for up to twice as long.