Your Water Toolbox: Using the Right Water Around Your House
If you own a home, you've noticed that you need to always be one step ahead of an impending home repair. It requires consistent maintenance to keep everything moving smoothly. All of that maintenance requires specific tools for specific jobs. You wouldn’t use a pipe wrench to paint a pantry. You wouldn’t use a hammer to stop that leak beneath your kitchen sink.
Did you know that using water around your home for different tasks is actually very similar to choosing the right pair of pliers for the right job? Whether it’s for washing dishes, baking a cake, or your morning shower, it’s important to make sure that you’re using the quality of water needed for the job at hand. By following the handy tips below, you’ll understand the impact that using the correct type of water around your home can have on the tasks that you do every single day.
1. Eating and Drinking
It’s no question that the health and safety of your family is first on your list. So, the water we drink and cook with should be the highest quality water possible. Reverse osmosis water provides the best experience in the kitchen. A reverse osmosis system provides the purest, taste-free filtered water that’s perfect for providing the ideal cup of coffee, delicious soups, and consistent base for baking bread because it removes contaminants on a microscopic level
When preparing family meals, it’s no question that using high-quality ingredients will yield better results at the dinner table. Whether we think of it as one or not, water is a staple ingredient in most of our meals, so it’s important to make sure we’re using water that won’t impact the flavor of whatever we’re putting it into.
The minerals in hard water, contaminants like iron, manganese or sulfur common in well water, and high amounts of chlorine found in some municipality’s water supplies can have a direct impact on the flavor of our favorite recipes. Hard water minerals also cause water to take longer to boil, something that can affect taste and texture. This is why soft water is often recommended for cooking.
2. Bathing and Cleaning
It’s a no-brainer that ditching hard water makes for better baths and sudsier showers. The dissolved minerals in hard water can wreak havoc on your skin and hair, leaving your body dry and irritated, and your hair dull and brittle. By using soft water in the shower, your body-wash and shampoos won’t need to fight against hard water minerals, meaning you’ll use less soap and feel cleaner after you dry off.
Or maybe you are dealing with stains caused by your water? Iron picked up by groundwater as it travels to your home could be leaving a rust color on your porcelain sinks. High sulfur content can give you black stains over time as well.
Since you won’t be drinking your bath water or mop bucket, the purest of waters isn’t necessary here. It does help to have treated water for regular household chores to make cleaning easier, use less soap, protect your skin and hair, and keep your fixtures looking shiny and new.
3. Outdoor Work
Typically, when talking about treating water, we don’t spend a lot of time talking about outdoor water use. When installing a residential softener or filtration unit, outdoor water connections are often bypassed. There’s a reason for that.
If you water your yard using a sprinkler connected to a normal garden hose for an hour a day, you will use about 1020 gallons of water. A whole month of regular sprinkler usage will have consumed 12,240 gallons of water. Considering this volume of water, there needs to be a specific reason to treat your outdoor supply.
In some instances, such as having very high iron content in your water that stains your home, picket fence, and sidewalk, it makes sense to filter water supplied to your outside faucet. But, in most cases, using untreated water for your gardening and outdoor tasks is perfectly adequate.
4. Home Appliances
We rely on our water-using appliances every day to keep our clothes and dishes clean, which is why it’s so important to ensure that they’re using the right water to keep them going for years. The scale and buildup that you might notice around the shower-head of a shower that uses hard water also builds in appliances.
In most cases, running hard-water through appliances will decrease their lifetime by years! This can lead to significant cost and frustration over time. By switching over to soft water, your appliances won’t need to work as hard, will use less soap and detergents, require less maintenance, and last as long as the manufacturer intended.
In humidifiers, using hard water can cause lung irritation. The residue leftover from the humidification process can damage the heating element, as well as promote certain bacterial growth which can cause lung irritation when the residual dust is released into the air. Switching over to soft water can alleviate most of these problems and will keep your humidifier working efficiently when you need it most.
Understanding how to use the right type of water for the right type of task around your house is the smart thing to do. If you’re currently stuck with just one tool in your home water toolbox, it might be time to look into WaterCare’s extensive offering of water treatment options. Once your home is equipped with the right tools, you can start saving time and money while keeping your family healthy. Call us today to discuss which options might be right for you!