When it comes to hard water in homes, most people across the country have this issue. Water hardness can impact your plumbing and even affect your health in some cases. Is hard water dangerous? The answer is not as clear-cut as you might think.
What Is Hard Water?
Hard water has dissolved minerals such as calcium and magnesium in it. These minerals come from the water dissolving them from the minerals in the ground. Consequently, groundwater sources typically provide harder water than surface sources.
When water has 7 or more grains of these solids per gallon, it falls under the categorization of hard water. Between 3.5 and 7 grains per gallon (gpg) is moderate and less than 3.5 gpg is soft water. These numbers are important when it comes to verifying the hardness of water and the effectiveness of water softeners.
Is Hard Water Dangerous?
Whether hard water is dangerous depends on how it gets to you. First, hard water itself does not have a negative impact on health. However, hard water can lead to corrosion of pipes. When the water etches into the metal used for the water supply pipes, it carries that extra metal to the tap where you drink it. Water that leaches copper or lead from pipes or pipe connections can have a negative impact on health due to excessive intake of these metals. Therefore, if you have an older home that has copper or lead pipes and you have hard water, you could have a long-term negative impact on your overall wellbeing.
Advantages of Softening Hard Water
Getting a home water softener improves your water quality and can extend the life of your water heater and plumbing. The Oceanus home water softener decreases hardness to less than 1 gpg (remember the hardness scale?). Therefore, your home’s water is not just softer, it’s considered chemically soft.
Soft water offers several benefits including:
- Preventing corrosion
- Protecting pipes against scale build-up
- Avoiding reduced efficiency in water heaters from scale
- Reducing soap required for cleaning
Contact Best Home Water Treatment Systems to Soften Hard Water
So, is hard water dangerous? If you have hard enough water to cause pipe corrosion and older pipes, it could be. However, hard water is detrimental to your plumbing, even if it’s not dangerous to your health. If you want the benefit of a whole-home water softener, contact us online at Best Home Water Treatment Systems or phone us at 951.737.1500.
Sources
https://besthomewatertreatmentsystems.com/products/water-softener-system/
https://besthomewatertreatmentsystems.com/contact-us
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3775162/
https://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/dwq/chemicals/hardness.pdf
