No more chipping my teeth on the water!

[major_clanger]

Water comes in various levels of hardness - soft, average, hard and then what comes out of our taps in Cambridge. Fed up with removing limescale from our shower doors (it shows up so wonderfully on perspex) and worried about what the insides of our boiler, washing machine and dishwasher were going to look like, we thought about getting a water softener.

Well, the bloke from the softener company has just been and gone, having poked around our plumbing whilst going "hmmm...". The thing about water softeners is that softened water is not drinkable - whilst not actually poisonous or anything, it is too salty for consumption. As such the normal practice is to keep the kitchen tap 'hard' and then run everything else off the softener. In our nice new house though, the water main comes in in the utility room, and the kitchen tap is well downstream of it (and thus the softener, which goes as close to the main as possible). This means either fitting new plumbing to provide a hard water feed to the kitchen (which might not have been too difficult a year ago when the place was being built, but is not a sensible option now) or else having a separate reverse-osmosis filter under the kitchen sink to make the softened water drinkable.

The second option looks like the sensible one so we're now awaiting a quote and installation/service plan. With any luck, scrubbing away at the shower doors with de-scaler will soon be a thing of the past.

MC

Comments

[bibliogirl.livejournal.com]

Interesting. In our area (that covered by Sutton and East Surrey Water, for supply anyhow -- for reasons lost in the mists of time, Thames Water take it away again), the water supplied is pre-softened. I can only guess that the process for such large-scale softening is different.

[bugshaw.livejournal.com]

How mad - softening then desoftening. Will the ute room tap be unsoftened, or would that interfere with softening the supply to our (crunchy) washing machine?

Hoorah! Now we'll be able to clean our toilets with just a brush, no need for a chisel!!

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

Well, the drinking water won't be made hard again - the filter removes dissolved minerals and so you get soft and very pure water. As I understand it, the utility tap would probably stay hard but the washing machine would come off the softener.

MC