The Hazards of Hard Water
Hard water is known to be both a nuisance and a major problem to most Arizona homeowners. It affects your skin when you’re bathing, your laundry when you’re doing wash, and your plumbing. It’s especially problematic to your plumbing, not only causing it to look awful, but it is a cause of major plumbing malfunctions.
So what exactly is hard water? Arizona’s water has a higher level of calcium and magnesium in it. This, over time, causes calcification. It’s easy to recognize calcification because you’ll be able to see the rock-like white and green build up on your faucets, spigots, and even in your shower heads.
Believe it or not, this calcification process is responsible for creating stalagmites and stalactites in caves. This same process is happening inside of your pipes on a daily basis.
As you can see from the image, after years of this happening, the opening for water flow becomes so narrow that even something as small as a single square of toilet paper can get caught and cause a major plumbing issue. Unfortunately, this image is not uncommon in Arizona homes.
We often find that calcification in pipes is the culprit for a lot of home plumbing issues. Not only do they cause your pipes to clog, they can puncture the actual pipe, causing sewage to leak into the ground around your home; which is a health hazard for you and your family.
Once this calcification reaches a certain point, the only thing that can be done to reverse it is to do a re-pipe of your home; which will end up costing you thousands of dollars.
Not only is hard water a hazard to your plumbing, it’s also bad for your home in general. Here’s how:
- Hard water doesn’t taste very good. Most people who have hard water realize that the water tastes “dirty”. This is because of the extra minerals. To fix this problem, they end up buying bottled water from the store; an additional expense.
- It causes clothing to feel rough or scratchy. By adding extra mineral deposits onto clothing, after laundering, the clothing is often left feeling rough and scratchy without the use of some form of fabric softener. Again, the purchase of fabric softener is an additional expense.
- Hard water is harsh on the skin. Arizona is already known to be a dry climate because we live in the desert. But hard water just makes it worse; requiring more skin care products, like lotion, to keep our skin soft. More additional expenses.
- Hard water can ruin your appliances. Do you have a coffee maker that you use? Ever notice how the appliances never seem to last? That’s because the calcium builds up in those pipes as well, causing malfunctions of expensive appliances. The list of expenses keeps climbing.
- Dirty looking dishes. Have you ever washed glasses only to notice water spots and dirty looking plates after they’ve dried? Hard water is the culprit for causing it. To fix this, most people will buy a dishwashing aid rinse (like Jet Dry) or rewash the dishes. Either way, this adds to the ever-climbing expenses to fix the problems that hard water causes.
As you can see, hard water is responsible for a lot of things that happen in your home on a daily basis; all minor inconveniences that you’ve just grown accustomed to. But the biggest problem of all that hard water will cause is the need to re-pipe your home. This will be a major expense; costing you thousands of dollars, time, and inconvenience.
Now that you know what it is, how do you fix it? The solution is simple: a Water Softener.
A water softener replaces the calcium and magnesium in your water with sodium or potassium. The difference between calcium and magnesium ions and sodium or potassium ions is that the sodium and potassium ions do not cause scaling or calcification. The water softener filters and distributes water that is conditioned to provide your home with the best water.
By having a water softener installed, you basically mitigate all of the issues listed above.
Call us to come and do a FREE water analysis and provide you with an estimate on what it would cost to have a water softener installed into your home.
Kenneth and Danny jetted all the waste lines in our house out to the street sewer. They flushed out an unbelievable amount of nasty sludge from under our island kitchen sink. Our house is only 12 years old and we bought it 9 months ago. The slow draining kitchen sink has been an issue since shortly after we moved in. After jetting the waste lines, they scoped the lines with a camera and proved to us the pipes were clear The Cummings Plumbing technicians were extremely professional, clean and thorough.
Earlier that day, we had a nationally-known competing plumbing company out, who told us they put a camera through the lines, and that we had a “belly” in a couple of our pipes–that the original lines probably had not been properly backfilled. (They never actually showed us the video.) They told us that correcting the problem would mean jackhammering up our ceramic tile floor and re-laying the pipes. It turned out, there was no bellying in the pipes at all. And, their estimate for jetting all the waste lines was more than twice what the Cummings estimate was! Turns out that the competing company is “commission based” on their sales, whereas Cummings techs are paid by the hour. I’m SO thankful that our realtor recommended calling Cummings for a second opinion!
Mark Y.
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