Water Softeners

If you don’t yet have a water softening system for your home or business, what in the world are you waiting for? Cloudy dishes, badly clogged pipes, scaly shower tiles and (shudders) crunchy cups of tea could all be distant memories of the ‘bad old days’ before you got a modern, efficient and affordable water softening system!

How do water softeners work? Your water is ‘hard’ because of the calcium and magnesium dissolved in it. This is exactly what is left behind when the water evaporates or freezes, leaving behind a chalky, scaly deposit (lime scale). Most water softeners work by trapping these calcium and magnesium ions and replacing them with less troublesome ones (usually sodium and potassium) which don’t build up on glassware, in kettles, or on surfaces. The ions are trapped as they flow through a container full of resin beads. The calcium and magnesium move into the beads, and sodium and potassium move out.

But if that was all there was to it, your beads would run out of the ‘good’ ions quickly, and the system would stop working. Replacing the beads would be both difficult and expensive, so that is out. Instead, these water softening systems use block, tablet or granulated salt (made up of good ions) to recharge the ions in the beads, whist the ‘bad’, hard ions which have been sequestered are sent away down the drain.

So, for the cost of some water softener salt and a little electricity, you get a constant supply of soft, conditioned water and fewer problems.