How to determine if you have Hard Water at home?

When people buy their homes, they often overlook the damage hard water can cause their homes. New home buyers may be oblivious about hard water if they haven’t lived in the neighborhood before. It’s important to check the water hardness at your home so you can proceed to take the right steps in reducing the adverse effects.
 
What is hard water?
 
Hard water is when there is a certain level of minerals in the water. This is often measured by grains per gallon or parts per million (PPM). Doing your laundry or other household tasks may be tough when your water is hard as more minerals equate to more stiffness and a harsh texture on clothes and washing.  Most people automatically think they need to change their detergent or washing machine when the real issue is hard water.
 
How to tell if you have hard water?
 
When buying a home, it may not be included within the information area of the listing. While not knowing is common for the new homeowners, it’s important to always check the water hardness as you can be spending hundreds of pounds/Euro trying to fix other problems when the source of the issue is really the water.
 
To check if you have hard water at home, you must call your local water supply and ask if your area or the neighborhood has hard or soft water. A 100 ppm reading would mean you have relatively soft water and a result of up to 180 ppm or above would mean hard to very hard water. An alternative way to check for hard water is to order a water test strip and conduct a hard water test in your home.
 
I have hard water! What do I do now?
 
There are some steps to take if you have hard water, and unfortunately, you can’t replace your water supply easily, if at all.

• When it comes to something like laundry, you must put in more detergent as the minerals like calcium and magnesium in hard water tend to soak up the detergent more. This is why there is harshness and stiffness when you’re done with your laundry. To help reduce and solve this, simply put more detergent. You may have to find a new balance between the amount of water and detergent you put in.
• An alternative and permanent way to prevent harshness and stiffness within your clothes is to look for a water softener. A water softener that’s beneficial and worth every penny is the EWT 606Gold Series system. It's not only energy and water efficient, but it’s also highly effective with salt efficiency. It removes the limescale from the water and reduces other minerals.

 
Even though drinking hard water doesn’t prove any negatives for the human body, it definitely doesn’t work the same way for household tasks like laundry. For more information on how you can solve the limescale or hard water issue in your home please click here.