What Kind Of Water Do You People Have Out There?

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launderess

launderess

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Quiet Please, There´s a Lady on Stage
Anyway.

Know we in New York are blessed with wonderfully soft water, but still am gobsmacked at the state of things that have arrived.

Steam boiler iron packed it in a month ago, so nabbed another professional one from up north (Canada). It arrived, was unpacked, and as per directions descaled (water and vinegar mix allowed to sit overnight), then emptied.

First draining produced water that was chalky white with all sorts of grit, sand, and what looked like small bits of rock. *Three* descaling solutions later it took *four* rinsing out with clean water (on top of the several descaling fluids) before water was finally clear, and free of grit, chalk and *rocks*.

Have never seen such a thing. Mind you other appliances or whatever that have arrived (such as eBay purchases) have been coated in chalk white residue that would chip teeth. Got a Nicro vacuum coffee pot off fleaPay that took a week of soaking and scrubbing with white vinegar to get the lower pot scale free.
 
We have lousy water

I'm glad we don't have a shortage of water, but it is full of minerals and prematurely messes up the plumbing fixtures and pipes. The water comes out of the Red River (Tx, La, Ark, Ok) which has a high salt content for being fresh water. I don't know if a water softener would correct that or not.
 
We are fortunate on this side of our metro area in that our water is taken out of the Patuxent River which is soft. Montgomery County takes their water from the Potomac which is quite full of minerals from the mountains and mines in them. I have used both and softer is better.
 
Extremely...

Soft (absolutely nothing happens on those test strips for hardness).

I couldn’t cope with even moderately hard water. Father in law has very hard water (Ireland) and it’s a nightmare, constant descaling, Brita filters etc etc

Only way I could see hard water being of benefit to me is that it would call for higher detergent doses, so would get through my stash quicker lol
 
I live several miles south of Seattle and our water is as soft as it can get. I never have to de-scale the coffeemaker and the acrylic (or fiberglass?) shower enclosure never has deposits on it (though I do use auto wax after cleaning it). None of our faucets have any evidence of scale either. The dishwasher and washer sparkle and we don't even bother using Jet-Dry since there's very little spotting, if any.

I suppose if you are on a well your situation might be different. We are in a semi-rural area. Just a few miles down the road, the homes are no longer on municipal water but a well. I'm not sure if they require a softener system or not.

The only issue I have with the water is the fact that the chlorine levels might be a little high. Our kitchen sink has a reverse osmosis filtration system.

I did buy a handheld steamer at Goodwill once and the reservoir was really scaled up, bad enough that there was chalky, rock-like substance inside and it rattled if you shook it. I had to run vinegar through it several times.
 
Both houses are 'off the grid' as far as water supply goes. The well in Ogden is hard with a good iron content. No need to eat spinach at our house...LOL

In St-Lib, the well water is not just hard, it's rich in sulfur. Running a tap would fill the room with the odor of rotten eggs; we got a water-treatment system PDQ needless to say.  We also had a water softener installed in Ogden just months after moving in.  I would have to say the water there is better than in St-Lib.
 
Vinegar is our best friend here in Oregon. We are on community wells and it pushes up very hard water. We descale every month or so, coffee pot, kettle and pots and pans that water boils in like a egg poacher. Looking in the washer we seldom see suds. We do use a britta. No automatic ice maker as it plugs up. We fill ice trays with britta water. My wife uses distilled water in her irons because she is a quilter and doesn't want chalky steam which can stain. Our towels are stiff all of the time. I put vinegar in the wash to help with that. We don't mind. It is just part of life and we maintain. The plus side is we live in Southern Oregon in a nice area surrounded with pines and madrone trees.
 
Here in Sonoma Co. we have very hard water. Our city uses community wells too, and there is a lot of calcium in the water. Just like Dan in the post above we us a Brita filter for our water, a faucet mount, which is very convenient.

Every time we use the stainless steel kitchen sink, we wipe off all the splashed water around the faucet and top ot the sink, otherwise it would always have hard water spots, same with the bathroom faucets. After we shower, we use a towel to wipe down all the tile, the faucet, shower caddy and overflow cover, to again prevent water spots. And just like Dan, we seldom see suds in the washer, and I always use the maximum amount of detergent in order to get things clean.

I descale the coffeemaker at least once a month and always use filtered water when I make coffee, it really does make a positive difference in the taste of the coffee.

Eddie
 
We have soft water, but the iron content is the issue with well water. Our house had a Sears Iron Removal filter that was close to 40 years old and didn't seem to do anything so we removed it. Looks like the only way to get around it is to get central water piped in. This type of iron isn't the kind that permanently stains but it leaves a residue over time on shower walls, etc if you don't clean well and often.
 
We have hard water in Munich which can be a nightmare sometimes.
But water quality is so much more than hardness alone.
Pollution levels are very low, it is even recommended for the preparation of baby food, has a pleasant taste, isn`t treated or chlorinated at all unless in the rare occasion of a severe flood and it`s "ice cold" year around.
Besides calcium and magnesium are supposed to be good for ones health and a little coating in the pipes doesn`t hurt either.

Taking a shower with traditional bar soap in New York City is truly amazing, but when I ran out of bottled water I found drinking the chlorine a little off putting.
Guess we can`t have it all.
 
Bleach & sulfur-rich water

Oh yeah... I learned that the hard way when we first moved to St-Lib, Tom!  I am still cautious because I believe our hot water tank still has some residue in it.  Hot water and Oxy-Clean are what I use for the whites now.
 
Guess am spoiled for choice then....

Just cannot imagine having to deal with such hard water on a regular basis.

Yes, showering/bathing here in NYC is joy; tons of lather!..... Yay!

Back when soap was queen of laundry day it was a boon to anyone that water here was soft. Lessened soap requirements, and or added extras like soda, phosphates, etc...
 
We've got perfectly fine relatively soft water here from the Detroit system---Flint (45 miles north) got scre@@ed by the move away from the Detroit system onto a different system (Karengondi) with different base chemistry than the Detroit water. It could have been perfectly safe if they had treated it appropriately (to preserve the pipe coating), but they chintzed out, didn't treat the water appropriately so the protective pipe coating was breached and the lead leached. Thanks Governor Snyder. A funny story, though. I went over to our facility in England about 3 years ago. They'd recently moved into a new facility about 2-3 months before, so didn't have water treatment in place. They warned us to drink either bottled water or to traipse to the canteen to get filtered. The kettle they used was so filthy and encrusted (remember it was only 2 months old) I could hardly believe it---I'd been using a kettle at work for literally YEARS with no buildup of scale/minerals. I guess I'd never seen really hard water!
 
Water

Our water is moderately hard. It has a bit of iron and sulfur in it, but not too much. We actually just received a letter in the mail saying that our water has high levels of a chemical compound. I threw the paper away and now can't find any info in regards to it. It would be very nice to have a water softener hooked up just before our water heater.
 

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