Enjoy Your New Home! Now Run!

Enjoy Your New Home! Now Run!

25-Apr-2017

So you just moved into your new home.  Congrats!  The boxes are slowly getting unpacked, and the furniture and tchotchkes are getting moved around (and around, and around) into their final position.  Your family is trying to get used to a new location, a new bed, a new neighborhood.  It’s an adventure, one that everybody is excited to undergo.

After all the cases of bottled water purchased for the move are gone, you go to the sink to pour yourself a glass to quench your thirst after your initial jog through the neighborhood.  You raise the glass to your lips, wet beads running down the sides of the cup, and take a nice, long gulp.

Uh oh. Something doesn't taste right.  At all.

What is that?  Metal?  Paint?  Rotten eggs?  An unholy mix of all that and something even more sinister?

Terrified, you throw the glass against the wall and it shatters, sending a deadly shard into the  treasured painting over the couch.  Ruined forever.  Just like your mood.

Soon afterwards, as you’re out spending $76.31 on enough bottled water to get you through the week, you notice that you keep scratching your arms and neck.  You ponder the reason for this insistent itch and come to the slow realization that your dry skin problem started when you moved in.  Come to think of it, those red bumps on your body did as well.  You glance down at your shopping cart, loaded down with high-end body wash, shampoo, conditioner, and lotions, and begin to freak out.

This is never going to end.  This is only the start of a long nightmare.

You leave the cart right where it is and go screaming into the night, Googling “hard water” as you run.

Far-fetched? Maybe, but not by much.  If you were to Google “effects of hard water” or “why does my water taste awful” you would start to make the connection that while you can control most of the things coming into your house, you can’t control the water.  Or your daughter’s boyfriend, to a degree.

Well, let’s rephrase that a bit.  You can condition the water that comes into the house.  But that costs money.  Money that you need for the bottled water, lotions, soaps, shampoos, cleaners, and other things you left in that shopping cart.  It would be absolutely asinine to drop a bunch of money on a whole home filtration system all at once.  Why, that would be like spending a pile of money on car insurance, instead of just fixing things that go wrong on cars as they happen. Who would do that?  I mean, that guy’s bumper can’t be that much, right?

Here’s the facts:  Chances are, no matter where you live you have hard water coming into your house.  Only 15% of the country has what is considered soft water, primarily because the source water for the municipal water district comes from rivers.  Just so we’re clear, anything with less than 3 grains per gallon of hardness minerals is deemed soft.  That’s pretty good.  

However, 85% of our great country is over that, and a lot are WAY over that.  The six “hardest” cities are, in no particular order:

Indianapolis
Las Vegas
Minneapolis/St. Paul
Phoenix
San Antonio
Tampa

I would put Detroit on that list, too.  Nobody would argue that town isn't hard.

So what, you say.  What does hard water really do, anyway?  Boiled down, four things you’ll care about:

Eats away at your plumbing and appliances.  

Anything that the hard minerals in your water are running through, at, or into is simply getting pounded day after day.  Water heater, pipes, washer, dishwasher, bathtub, toilet, and more are getting calcified, stained, clogged, and basically destroyed.  But most choose to just get it go on and hope for the best.

Irritates the heck out of your skin. 

Remember that constant itching and scratching?  The dryness and flaking?  The bumps and clogged pores?  Blame those pesky minerals again… Dermatologists have some great names for it – “cradle cap” “seborrheic dermatitis” “pompholyx” (that one sounds like a Batman villain) “rosacea” – but they all point to the high pH of hard water as the root cause.  But some people love it…Hey, is that Avon calling?

Spots.  

You’ll know ‘em when you see ‘em.  Everywhere!  Glassware, dishware, reading glasses, countertops, around the sink… if hard water touches it, it’ll spot it.  And so will you.  Unless that’s part of your décor, you won’t want to keep running into them.

Rough, dry and tangled hair.

 Let’s face it – grunge died in the 90s, and now people enjoy hair they can run fingers through (unless you’re bald…but that’s another blog for another day).  What happens is the hard water makes the scales in hair stand up, hence the roughness and tanglenation™.  Oh, and this means more shampoo and conditioner, because you can’t rinse it all out.  One of the cities with the softest water is Amsterdam, where Frederique van der Wal is from.  Coincidence? Who knows?  But do you really want to have hair that feels like something livestock would think twice about eating?

So, with all this talk about hard water, if you’re still with us then you want to at least look into what your shiny brand new house can do to protect itself.  We know, because your house called us while you were at work.  Why not schedule a free water analysis and let us show you the correct system for you and your family.  Your pipes will thank you, while the toiletry aisle manager probably won’t – he works on commission.