Dangerous Hardness Ions

Water is everywhere. Nothing can happen without it and nothing can live. We commonly say about pure water and impure one. This recording to the possibility of drinking it or not. But except the rain there is no such thing as clean water. There is one important class of impurity: hardness.

Hard water is the type in which we have dissolved minerals of magnesium and calcium. And water that comes to our houses probably always has it. It's kind of a natural process: rain is falling and getting into the rivers and finally to our houses. But while it sleeps trough the ground it is slightly possible that it picks up minerals from the rocks like limestone, chalk. And that is the reason of hard water at home.

As it may seem natural to have that kind of water at home it may cause different problems. For example when you are wondering why your bills for heating increased the limescale might be the answer. The minerals, during the heating process, form a visible scale in pipes. As a result, the scale is clogging them and the efficiency of heat that it is needed to make water hot is increasing. That is why bills may get much higher. Whole process may also damage other appliances which are using heated water as for example kettles and dishwashers, and shorten their lives. Not speaking about smaller issues caused by hard water as sticky hair or harsh clothes.

We have two categories of hard water - temporary hard and permanent. The first one is water which hardness can be removed by boiling it. It's caused by combination of ions and bicarbonate ions in the water. And boiling promotes the formation of carbonate from the bicarbonate and precipitates calcium carbonate out of solution, leaving water that is softer upon cooling. Second type is much harder to soft and this is the one which deposits limescale and causes all the bad effects that were described above. To make permanent hard water soft you can't boil it. Heating permanent hard water increasing the problem. You need a good water treatment.

The most popular solution is using water softener. It might be one that works by replacing the calcium and magnesium in the water with sodium. Or an electronic limescale remover, that may remove lime scale problem. The truth is that all are less expensive than ignoring the problem. Prevention might be much cheaper than removing the effects. In that case the only thing left is to think about the best solution for you to deactivate dangerous 'hardness ions'.

Article By Idalia Luczak