If you live in beautiful Birmingham AL, here’s a fact you should know: The city’s water generally ranges from hard to very hard.
What does this mean for you? Well, hard water can definitely have negative effects for human beings and plumbing appliances alike. Fortunately, though, excellent plumbing professionals — like those from Benjamin Franklin Plumbing — could flush away your hard water blues.
Understanding Water Hardness
To start, let’s define what “water hardness” is. Hard water has higher-than-average mineral content. Specifically, it tends to have greater amounts of magnesium, calcium, or lime.
By contrast, soft water has a much lower concentration of those dissolved minerals.
What makes water hard or soft? It depends on the local area — specifically, the soil and rocks in the region. When nearby soil and rock layers are rich in minerals, a home is more likely to have hard water.
The hardness of water is measured in units called grains per gallon, or gpg. (If you use the metric system, it would be milligrams per liter, or mg/L.) Soft water has a gpg measurement of 0 to 3. Moderate water hardness, meanwhile, ranges from 3.5 to 7 gpg. And hard water measures above 7.5 gpg.
It’s easy to find out the hardness of your home’s water with a water test kit. You could pick one up at a local hardware or home improvement store, or you could buy one on the internet.
Many of these kits have a strip to submerge in a water sample. Once you dip your strip, it’ll change color. And that new hue will tell you how hard your water is.
The Hazards of Hard Water
Note that moderate water hardness is the most preferable. That’s because, when a water supply provides some magnesium and calcium, it can boost people’s health. Both of those minerals can strengthen bones, for example.
However, hard water can be problematic. For one thing, it leaves behind different types of residue. It can coat bathtubs and sinks with limescale, for instance, and it can form white spots on dishes and glasses.
Plus, when excess calcium in water mixes with soap, it can result in a stubborn film, one with the unappealing name of “soap scum.” You might find soap scum all over your shower and sink. Not to mention, dirt, grime, hair, dead skin, and other substances can cling to soap scum, making it even more disgusting.
There’s more: Hard water can make it harder for soap to clean people’s skin. Hard water can also dry out or irritate the skin. It can make some people’s hair frizzy or brittle as well.
Hard water can do real damage to items in your home, too. For instance, its residue can build up inside washing machines, dishwashers, and other appliances, damaging their parts and making them much less effective. In particular, hard water often causes water heater failures.
With hard water, such appliances may also need extra electricity to work. Thus, your monthly utility bills would increase.
Likewise, hard water buildup can clog pipes, lowering the water pressure throughout a home. Similarly, it could block a main sewer line, and it could corrode toilet parts.
Hard water could even harm your laundry. It might fade your colors, wear out your clothing faster, or make your fabric feel rougher.
On top of all that, households often experience lingering odors when their water is hard.
The Hard Water of Birmingham, Ala.
Throughout Alabama, the public water supply is often soft or moderately soft. As mentioned above, however, Birmingham is one of the state’s exceptions.
Birmingham’s water tends to be hard or very hard because it comes from mineral-rich rock layers such as dolomite, limestone, and chert.
Fortunately, there are effective ways to deal with hard water. For example, you could hire experts to install a water softener. A water softener is a treatment system that continuously removes and flushes away minerals inside water.
In the end, with the right water softener — and the right installation process — everyone in your home would benefit. They’d all enjoy softer, safer, and healthier water every time they turned on a faucet or showerhead.