Your body is made up of 70 percent water, making it necessary to get an adequate intake each day to function properly. Without good-quality water, you may feel sluggish and dehydrated.
Public water treatment facilities remove many dangerous contaminants from our water supply, but they don’t always remove the impurities that make your water taste or smell unpleasant. As a result, you may be consuming water that’s less than ideal for your body’s needs.
Why Do We Need Quality Water?
Good water quality has many benefits for our bodies, such as:
Better Health
Good water quality prevents waterborne illnesses and contamination from synthetic hormones, pharmaceuticals, agricultural chemicals and household chemicals we come in contact with every day. These contaminants may be found in antibiotics, birth control, household cleaners, shampoo or residential pesticides.
While the Environmental Protection Agency tests for many contaminants that are hazardous to public health, many individual public water supply companies don’t test for small amounts of these contaminants.
Better Appliance Performance and Health
Water quality not only impacts your health, but it also impacts the health of your appliances. Your dishwasher, automatic washing machine, water heater, coffee machine and other appliances that use water experience wear and damage from the constant use of hard water, which is water that contains mineral deposits collected from the soil. While these mineral deposits themselves are harmless, they do leave behind scale on your pipes and fixtures that damages them over time.
Softened water, on the other hand, undergoes a process that removes calcium, magnesium and other mineral deposits that may be left behind on your pipes. With better water quality, your appliances perform more efficiently and last longer.
Fresh Taste
Certain deposits in your water, such as hydrogen sulfide gas or iron, can leave it with a foul smell or poor taste. These can not only damage your plumbing, but they also end up in your body when you drink, cook with or bathe in water containing these deposits.
Water filters remove these impurities that cause foul-smelling and -tasting water by trapping microorganisms, leaving behind fresh, pure-tasting water.
Less Cleaning
The mineral deposits in hard water leave scale buildup on your pipes and fixtures, as well as on your skin, hair, clothes and dishes. This buildup is very difficult to remove, leading you to use more soap, shampoo or detergent to clean properly. On top of that, once the buildup is there, no amount of cleaning solution can completely remove it. It can also wear away at the porcelain enamel in your bathroom over time.
A water softener can remove these mineral deposits, leaving you with clean water. Over time, the scale buildup will dissolve, so your detergent and soap can perform optimally.
How to Improve Water Quality
Now that you understand the value of good water quality for your health and appliances, how do you achieve pure, clean water for your home?
Water Softeners
Water softeners treat hard water in your home by removing calcium, magnesium and sediment from your water through an ion-transfer with sodium and potassium. Water softeners have a small brine tank filled with resin beads that carry a negative charge. Since both calcium and magnesium carry positive charges, they cling to the beads as hard water passes through the tank, leaving you with softened water.
Water Filters
Water filters come in several types that use different mechanisms to remove impurities from the water:
- Activated carbon: This type of water filter uses activated carbon granules based on charcoal. Because charcoal is porous, it attracts and traps chemical impurities as they pass through it. Charcoal is excellent at removing chlorine-based impurities from industrial solvents or pesticides, but it doesn’t help with hardness, heavy metals, minerals or microbes.
- Reverse osmosis: This type of water filter forces contaminated water through a membrane at a high pressure, which pushes water through and leaves contaminants behind. Reverse osmosis is excellent at removing pollutants like salt or limescale, but less effective at removing bacteria or other pathogens.
- Ion exchange: This type of water filter uses zeolite beads containing sodium ions, which traps incoming magnesium and calcium ions. This is similar to the process of softening water.
Different types of filtration remove different pollutants, which is why many homeowners choose a combination of filtration systems to remove as many contaminants as possible.
Water Quality Maintenance
There are a few measures you can take to properly maintain your home water systems and ensure they operate efficiently to keep your water pure.
Maintain Your Water Softener
You should routinely check your water softener’s salt levels to be sure that it has what it needs to soften your water. This is done by lifting the tank lid and to see if the salt is more than half full. If necessary, replace the salt that was lost to maintain the proper function.
Keep Your Water Filters Clean
Water filters accumulate contaminants with use, so it’s important to follow the instructions on how often to check, clean or replace your filter. If it’s not regularly maintained, your water filter may not be able to completely remove contaminants from the water supply.
Visit EcoWater Systems
Poor water quality can have a significant impact on your family’s health, your appliances and your fixtures. Fortunately, there are many water quality products that can help you improve the quality of your water and protect your home and family.
If you’re concerned about the quality of your home’s water, EcoWater Systems can help. We offer a range of home water softeners, water filters and whole home water systems to address all your water quality concerns. No matter if your issue is hardness, contamination, chemicals or something else, we can provide you with water quality solutions that give you the purest, cleanest drinking water possible.
Our experts would be happy to help you find a drinking water solution that’s customized to your unique needs. Contact us today to learn more about our water treatment, filters and purification systems and see how we can help you!