Is your water causing you extra work?
If you are spending your time scrubbing water spots off your glasses, white scaly deposits from your showers and sinks, and using more laundry soap and shampoo than you think you should, then you are working harder than you have to. All that time spent scrubbing is unnecessarily wasted, you could be having fun with the family instead of scrubbing till your hands and back ache. The fact is, your water might be causing you far more work than it is saving.
Hard water simply means that it contains more minerals than ordinary water. The most common minerals in this case are calcium and magnesium. Hard water is not a health risk, but it is a nuisance because of all the problems these minerals produce. As water moves through soil and rock, it dissolves very small amounts of minerals and holds them in solution. The degree of hardness of water is greater as the calcium and magnesium content increases. The amount of hardness affects the amount of soap and detergent needed for cleaning. Soap used in hard water combines with the minerals to form a sticky soap curd. Bathing in hard water with soap leaves a sticky soap film on the skin as well as in the hair. This film can make skin itchy and irritated and leave hair dull and lifeless as well as difficult to manage.
Laundry is also affected by hard water, soap lodges in the fabric during washing to make fabric stiff and rough. Because the water and detergent don’t work well together there can be soil left in the laundry causing a graying of white fabric and dulling of colors in other fabrics. When you notice that they aren’t clean, you throw them back in the wash and run them through again. The problem with this is that continuous laundering shortens the life of the clothes and sour odors can also develop in these situations.
Hard water doesn’t just affect your skin, hair, clothes and dishes; it also affects your appliances. Heated hard water forms a scale of calcium and magnesium minerals that make your hot water heaters, dishwashers, and other water using appliances work much harder. Pipes can also become clogged with scale that reduces water flow and ultimately requires pipe replacement.
All in all, hard water doesn’t really hurt anyone health-wise, it just makes regular life more difficult. It creates more work than it cleans up. Perhaps you think a water softener isn’t for you, but if your life is littered with the scenarios that are listed above, then perhaps you do need a softener. Consider that you could simply load the dishwasher and when it is finished you could unload the dishes into the cabinet and not rescrub any of them. Laundry would be easier too, no need to rewash that load of clothes because it is actually clean the first time it’s washed and the clothes last longer.
Water softening systems are among the most popular home improvement items on the market today. Because they do make life easier, they also make a home more desirable on the market. We lead busy enough lives as it is without adding lots of hours of extra cleaning to remove the spots that our water leaves behind. There is nothing more discouraging than opening up the dishwasher to find that it just didn’t do a good job. We don’t need extra work; we need extra time for all the other things we want to do in our lives. Investing in a water softener would allow us the freedom to go out and do those things we currently only dream about.
