Soft Water for Your Home

Before water can be collected for treatment and distribution from a municipal water system, it has likely spent some time in lakes, rivers and underground as groundwater. As water flows over and comes in contact with the earth, it collects minerals and impurities. Water that contains minerals, most commonly calcium and magnesium, is described as “hard” water. The higher the concentration of dissolved minerals, the harder the water.

Water hardness is measured in milligrams per liter or grains per gallon, with higher numbers representing harder water. While most municipal water authorities treat water with some type of disinfectant, such as chlorine, they do not remove these dissolved minerals.

Ventura County and parts of Los Angeles County are home to some of the hardest water levels in the United States. If you happen to live in one of these areas, you will find that conditioned water is a need, not a want. Sure, you’ll enjoy the many "wants" that soft water brings, like healthier skin and hair, softer clothes and towels with brighter colors and less usage of soap and detergent to get things clean. But protection from scale and corrosion damage to pipes, plumbing and water using appliances falls squarely in the “needs” category. When you consider the cost savings due to the extended life cycles of these items, installing conditioned water service reflects a sound financial decision.

Not surprisingly, hard water can cause a myriad of problems with piping and appliances. However, you may be surprised by some not so obvious hard water related issues. So let’s get started.

Most problems with hard water build-up and scale begin when water is heated in your water heater or dishwasher. Heating hard water causes calcium carbonate to form and attach to the heating elements of appliances, resulting in higher energy costs due to lowered efficiency. This scale buildup also reduces the life of the appliances and clogs water piping, diminishing flow capacity. 

Once the dissolved hard water minerals inside the pressurized plumbing system are released into the atmosphere at faucets and shower heads, they create several additional problems. 

You’ve undoubtedly noticed white crusty residue on older faucets and shower tile walls and floors. This unsightly scale can corrode plumbing fixtures and cause pitting of tile finishes.

You probably already know that hard water is the cause of water spotting on your glass shower doors as well as dishes and glassware. But did you know that hard water minerals can attach to clothing in your automatic washing machine? Over time, your apparel becomes stiff and loses color and brightness.

Now let’s talk about soap. Dishwashing and laundry detergent, shampoo and nearly all hand and body soaps bond with the minerals in hard water. This drastically reduces their cleaning power and effectiveness, resulting in increased cleaning products costs as well as that soap film ring that forms in the bathtub.

Probably the most irritating (literally) problem with hard water minerals is their drying and damaging effect on your skin and hair. Many individuals are allergic or sensitive to hard water minerals that can cause dry, itchy or irritated skin. Additionally, these contaminants can lead to dry and damaged hair and can interact negatively with hair dyes and conditioning products, causing poor uptake and inconsistent color appearance and quality.

A typical water softening system removes calcium and magnesium ions from hard water and replaces them with sodium ions. The water softener unit is normally installed near where the water enters your house so that it softens the water used for drinking and washing but not for irrigation. The soft water tank is filled with resin beads that attract hard water mineral ions (via a chemical process called ion exchange) as the water flows through. By the time the water reaches the bottom of the tank, the minerals have been collected in the resin bed and the now soft water feeds the house. Eventually, the resin beads become depleted of sodium ions and saturated with mineral residue and can no longer produce soft water. These resin beads have reached exhaustion and must be regenerated.

For automatically regenerating water softeners, a control valve that sits atop the soft water tank contains a smart meter that calculates when the resin media needs regeneration. When this point is reached, the media beads within the tank are automatically washed with a brine solution from an adjoining tank, dislodging the calcium and magnesium particles and simultaneously recharging the resin beads with sodium from the brine. Upon completion of this washing/recharging process, the excess brine with the contaminant particles is rinsed to a drain and the regeneration cycle is complete.

Some cities in our service area do not allow automatically regenerating water softeners because of limitations on the treatment of brine. For these customers we offer our tank exchange service. Under this monthly rental program, we connect an exchangeable water softener tank to your home’s incoming water supply pipe. No brine tank is required with this system because we pick up your soft water tank prior to exhaustion and reinstall a fully recharged tank that has been processed at our new state-of-the-art regeneration facility in Oxnard. All you have to do is enjoy the conditioned water. We do everything else. What could be easier?

There is a common misconception that because sodium ions replace the hard water mineral ions, soft water must be salty and thus unhealthy. Each cubic foot of resin can effectively remove calcium and magnesium from about 3,200 gallons of hard water, which is generally defined as 10 grains per gallon hardness. The process in this example would add about 750 milligrams of sodium to each gallon of water, which the U.S. Food and Drug Administration considers to be in the “low sodium” range for commercially sold beverages.

Many of our residential customers choose to add a reverse osmosis or other drinking water filtration system in order to filter out contaminants not removed by a water softener, such as chlorine and chloramines, lead, arsenic, cysts, pesticides and volatile organic chemicals. We also offer filters to improve your water’s taste and odor. If you have additional questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact one of our helpful sales team members for more info or to schedule a no obligation in home consultation.