Scale inhibitors

[Kes]

Until about four years ago we had a salt water softener, and when you took a drink of the softened water, as I occasionally did, it was as sweet as you could want. Then we refurbed the laundry room and the old softener was too tall to fit anywhere, so it went. I was too mean to splash out for a modern unit, and I didn't like the idea of installing it into fitted cupboards, having to empty the cupboard to fill it, the awkwardness of filling it in a cupboard, and the effect that residues of salt would have on the crappy chipboard units. (We also had an inline magnetic device but I have no idea what this did and it went during the refurb.) We have a private water supply so whatever is in the water it isn't any (added) chlorine: it is very hard though.

So I bought a Waterking Sentry. I chose this as the website didn't have any fairy tales or sweeping promises, there seemed to be some attempt to test the thing, and when I spoke to Lifesciences about it they didn't give any flannel and said why not try it, you can always get your money back under the guarantee.

I fitted the unit on the 22mm cold feed to the h/w cylinder, about a metre from the entry point in the cyl. We have a simple vented system. The pipework in the airing cupboard is cross-bonded to the mains and a few other pipes. All copper of course.

Now for the 'evidence' - I'll try to be impartial but some is bound to be er, what's the word for opinion not evidence?

The same day whilst showering both I and my wife (separately, the cab isn't large enough for two) mentioned that the water seemed more 'slippery'. Also coffee tasted awful. Both of these effects wore off quite quickly, or perhaps we became used to them and we are still drinking, and serving, foul-tasting coffee.

We used to use a Brita filter for tea and coffee, filled from the cold tap of course. After three or four days I noticed a fair amount of light grey sludge in the top compartment. I took this as scale being removed from the pipework. This diminished in time, I eventually dropped the filter, so we just fill the kettle straight from the taps now. The kettle doesn't have those tectonic plates inside it any more, just a light layer of scale, and flakes, some of which end up being drunk.

After several months the shower, which used to squirt a more or less solid jet of water on top of your head, suddenly started to act like a dainty rose, and now it's more a shower than a hose pipe. There is of course still light scale around the shower head.

The biggest drawback is that we get scale deposits in the bathrooms. The scale might not form in the pipework, but does so quite happily on the sanitaryware. The washbasins and showers are the worst, so we have to use the rather vicious limescale removers. I suppose if you cleaned them more frequently than we do then a quick wipe would keep it at bay. The kitchen and laundry room hardly suffer at all, with just a little deposit around the tap nozzle.

I don't know what it does to the washing machine. I can't say that the water suds up better or worse then before. There's no visible problem with scale. The towels are stiff when dry so they get a bash in the dryer, but I don't know if they were like this before.

In all I am happy with the unit. I might one day fit a polyphosphate (or whatever it is) scale reducer to try to reduce the deposits in the bathrooms but I don't know what interaction it will have with the Waterking. One day is still some way off.

(I'm going to hack up the old magnetic 'scale reducer' and fit it to the oil feed pipe on the boiler. Instant reduction in oil use! Ha ha, one day...)

 

[Softus]

Interesting post, Kes.

One thing confuses me - if you fitted the WaterKing on the cold feed to the cylinder, then it should have a beneficial effect on the stored hot water and the stored cold water, but not anything supplied directly from the mains.

So I don't understand why the taste of your coffee changed, and also the amount/type of scale inside the kettle. Or did that change coincide with removing the water softener?

In the places where you're getting more scale, by any chance is that from taps fed by mains cold water?

 

[Kes]

Ah, it comes to me now, subjective was the word I was looking for.

The softener was disconnected some time before the Waterking was installed, whilst I refurbed the laundry room in my inimitably steady manner, so there was a period when we were running on nothing.

From what I remember from the blurb all you need to do the entire house is an electrical path, I assume that the cross-bonding - which is right next to the WK, is transferring the electrical impulses into the mains. We have a plastic storage tank so there's no path there. Maybe a second WK on the mains inlet would be even better.

As we have urinary-poor 'mains' pressure everything except the kitchen and laundry room is fed from the storage tank in the roof, bathroom cold taps and loos included. No mains at all upstairs except the feed to the storage tank in the loft.

On the whole a salt water softener probably produces more pleasant results (as the WK is primarily a scale reducer) but the WK uses fewer resources in power (and salt!) and is a reasonable compromise.