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KBSA Consumer Guide
Our FREE guide contains practical advice for consumers who are considering buying a new kitchen, bedroom, bathroom or home office.
Water softeners
Around 60 percent of people in the UK live in hard water areas and suffer the problems that go with it – some immediately obvious – scale in the kettle, elements in dishwashers and washing machines scaling up, scum in your tea, limescale marks in toilets and washbasins and showerheads blocking up – others less so but potentially more expensive – boilers and heating systems clogging up with scale – in particular, boiler heat exchangers, hot water cylinders, radiators and connecting pipework.
There are lifestyle problems associated with hard water too of course! Hard water requires more soap, shampoo and detergent to get a decent lather. It tends to leave washing – particularly towels – feeling hard and rough to the touch. It’s not good for hair or skin and it can actually make skin complaints like eczema and psoriasis worse.
So while hard water is not directly harmful – water companies have no legal requirement to soften the water they supply – hard water can take its toll on your plumbing, on your purse and your skin and it means that you could be, quite literally, pouring money down the drain.
Heated hard water forms a scale of calcium minerals (limescale deposits) which can clog up your pipework, reduce the effectiveness of your heating and hot water system, and contribute to the inefficient operation or failure of water-using appliances.
If scale builds up on an element, it has to heat the scale before it heats the water. Just 1.6mm of scale in heating systems causes a 12 per cent loss in heat transfer from the energy source (gas, electricity) to water, in terms of heating efficiency.
