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Over
two-thirds of the earth’s surface is covered by
water, but less than 0.3% of the earth’s total
water supply is usable by humans. The demand on
water supplies is growing exponentially.
Clearly, understanding and using scarce water
resources wisely is vital. Our very survival as
a species depends on it. Severe drought
conditions, weather anomalies and overpopulation
have made things worse than ever before.
Governments around the world, at all levels are
investing hundreds of billions of dollars to
improve infrastructure and water quality
standards. Before your water gets to your glass,
your bath or business, it travels a tortuous
path through the environment. As nature’s
strongest solvent, water dissolves a little bit of
everything it touches, allowing many organic and
inorganic pollutants to mix with the water.
Minerals and impurities in water have created a
“hard water” epidemic that along with other
waterborne health hazards such as chlorine, a
widely recognized carcinogen, is increasingly
headline news. Hard water slowly destroys
everything it touches. Left untreated, hard
water costs you money, ruins your lifestyle and
can even lower the value of your home. Even very
low levels of hardness and other inorganic
metals and minerals can react with soaps and
detergents to form a gummy, insoluble curd that
will cling stubbornly to everything it touches.
The ring around your bathtub is
curd. That same curd causes your hair to become
dull and hard to manage. Soap curd clogs the
pores of your skin and prevents your natural
oils from moisturizing your skin. This dryness
can cause itching and even aggravate skin
conditions like psoriasis, eczema and acne. Soap
curd is especially noticeable by the scummy film
that it forms on dishes, glassware, walls and
floors. Hardness and other dissolved solids
combine to form the residue you see as spots on
glasses, crockery, cutlery and shower
enclosures. Laundry washed in hard water takes
on a gray color and wears out faster than
expected. With hard water in your washing
machine, it’s almost impossible to wash clothes
white - even when you use large amounts of
detergent and bleach. Minerals and insoluble
particles in tap water can trap dirt & soap curd
in the fabric of your clothes and linens. In
addition to giving whites a dull, gray
“washed-out” look and making the fibers rough &
brittle, this inorganic sludge can create a
breeding ground for bacteria. Your clothes and
linens then feel harsh & rough, deteriorating
much faster. Some vegetables such as peas and
beans become tough and unpalatable when cooked
in hard water. Cooking with hard water imparts
an undesirable taste from the hardness minerals,
metals and other contaminants directly into your
food. Tea, Coffee and other beverages prepared
with hard water taste awful and often contain
flakes of hardness & other inorganic
contaminants. Water heaters, humidifiers,
boilers and household pipes become lined with an
increasingly thick layer of calcium and
magnesium scale. As this scale builds up, the
water flow in your pipes diminishes to such a
point that new piping is sometimes the only
solution to remedy the situation. Hard water
scale inside the water heater forms a rocky
insulating layer that, according to the US
Department of Energy can force a water heater to
use up to 30% more energy to heat your water.
Hard water and inorganic minerals
are found in more than 85% of waters in the
United States.
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