All I can say is that anything which does not remove it or chemically change
it usually clumps it together using magnetic or electrostatic effects which
tends to eventually result in very clogged up pipes near that device. I is
is nowhere near as effective as filtering. However having said that, being a
cheapskate I have left it as is and still need to descale things here in the
Thames Water area. I don't recall it ever being as hard as it is these days,
and it makes me wonder if its coming from erosion of the big concrete pipes
in the London ring.
Brian

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"Paul" wrote in message
...
pinnerite wrote:
I am shortly to move to a bungalow that needs a lot of TLC.
I want to ensure that we do sometghing to counteract hard water.

It is either a water softener or an inhibitor,
Do the latter actually work?

Recommendations please.

TIA


The process isn't inhibition, because the offending material
arrives already in the water. And it's your job to do
something about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_exchange

"Ion exchange is a method widely used in household filters
to produce soft water for the benefit of laundry detergents,
soaps, and water heaters. This is accomplished by exchanging
divalent cations (e.g., calcium Ca2+ and magnesium Mg2+) with
highly soluble monovalent cations (e.g., Na+ or H+)
(see water softening)."

"Water softeners are usually regenerated with brine containing
10% sodium chloride.[6] Aside from the soluble chloride salts
of divalent cations removed from the softened water, softener
regeneration wastewater contains the unused 50 – 70% of the
sodium chloride regeneration flushing brine required to reverse
ion-exchange resin equilibria."

In the forward direction, it removes the calcium from the water,
and uses up salt in the process. Every once in a while, the
resin must be "recharged", by loading salt into it and
flushing out the calcium that has collected.

Don't own one, don't know the details.

*******

There is also reverse osmosis, which is how the Israelis
convert sea water to fresh water. The membranes must be
replaced at regular intervals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_osmosis

*******

Distillation will clean up water, but who wants gobs of
calcium in the boiler at the bottom ? Distillation is
not microbially clean. Or so our microbiologist told us.
He made fun of the stills we were running on the chem
lab side of the building, as being "impure". I would
expect his had UV or ozone or something for a final step.
Since nobody went into his lab, we don't know anything
about his setup (not after the sewage incident at least,
he had to analyze sewage once, and there was a spill).

Paul