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Hard water is annoying.
It ruins appliances, spots dishware, stains faucets and showerheads, tastes and smells weird, and dries out your skin and hair. While it isn’t detrimental to your health, hard water wreaks plenty of havoc on your possessions.
Let’s examine all the ways mineral-heavy water makes life miserable.
Stubborn Stains
When water evaporates, it leaves behind trace amounts of minerals. Those spots on your dishes? That’s mineral residue.
Hard water does not seem to present health hazards, but it makes your table settings look unattractive. Left unchecked, calcium build-up can affect the performance of your faucets and showerheads.
These stains are easy enough to scrub away with metal-and-rust remover or even just a bit of white vinegar. However, so long as the water coming out of your tap is hard, you can expect this to be an ongoing problem.
Sad Showers
Shower with hard water is a bummer for two reasons: it can slow jets of water down to a trickle and make it difficult to work up a good lather.
Low water pressure: The minerals in your water can clog the showerhead, reducing water pressure, but the problem might be deeper than what’s visible on the fixture. With a slow accumulation of dissolved calcium and magnesium over the years, the deposits can attach to the water pipe walls and decrease the flow.
Lack of lather: Hard water interferes with your ability to work up a soapy, sudsy lather. That’s because the minerals in your hard water hijack the soap of its foaming ingredients. Hard water also saps your skin of much-needed moisture, leaving it dry and itchy, and your hair dull and lifeless.
And because hard water prevents soap from dissolving completely, you’ll have a film of scummy residue on the shower walls and base of the tub.
Compromised Appliances
Hard water impacts the two appliances you probably use the most: your water heater and your dishwasher.
Water heater: Sediment that settles in the bottom of a unit can slowly erode the heating elements so that they cannot perform as you expect. Corrosion on the lower walls can allow a leak to escape, and you may not notice a problem until you see water on the floor.
Dishwasher: The sprays that clean your dishes must pass through tiny holes that calcium and other minerals can block. Also, minerals can build up on the components of the appliance, such as the pumps and heating elements, causing them to short out.
Washing machine: As we mentioned above, soaps and detergents do not respond well to hard water, and you can notice the poor relationship through your washer’s window. Much of the soap remains in the clothes after the spin cycle, making the fabric stiff and uncomfortable.
Small appliances: The replacement of large appliances like your dishwasher or water heater can take a large chunk out of your household budget. Not surprisingly, small appliances can create an unnecessary drain on resources as well. Each one that uses water may need a replacement long before the manufacturers’ expectations. Your coffee maker or tea kettle in the kitchen can conk out just when you need it the most. In the laundry, your steam iron’s tiny water line can clog and stop spraying. In the rooms where you want to provide extra moisture to relieve respiratory problems, the humidifier may fail to produce it. The fancy showerheads that you wanted to try may not create a spray unless you buy acidic solvents to clean them.
Faulty Faucets
As an expression of creativity that defines a bathroom or kitchen, a decorative faucet can reflect your distinctive style. Even the tap in your laundry room may have an arch that makes it uniquely helpful in filling buckets when you need them. The calcium deposits in hard water can diminish the beauty of a faucet. However, limescale removers can dissolve them, but they may ruin the finish.
Aside from defacing an elegant accent, hard water minerals can damage the washers, ruin the seals, and create leaks. Blockages can occur in the valves and require replacement for no other reason. Even the delivery of water can cause frustration when mineral buildup prevents a smooth flow and makes the water spray in one direction or another.
Other Inconveniences
As you buy products to balance your use of hard water, the costs can start to mount. It requires you to bring in more soap, shampoos, dry skin creams, and cleaning chemicals than you require with soft water, and the need never ceases. As an impact on the environment, the purchases may require more packaging, waste disposal, and transportation to stores to acquire them. A whole house water filtration system can put soft water in every faucet while relieving you of expense and hours of cleaning and scrubbing.
Bottom line: If you’re sick of having to scrub your sink clean after washing dishes, tired of applying gallons of lotion to your skin, and are ready for some fresh and clean water, contact us today for a whole house water filtration system. Our team of experts will be able to evaluate your situation and provide you with the best solution. Call us today (516) 217-2196 for more information.