Water softening system for a cottage

Hard water means a lot of trouble

1. Electric kettles, steam cookers, boiler, washing machines and dishwashers suffer the most.
2. Due to the scale formation on the heating elements, household appliances consume more electricity, then overheat and fail.
3. Hard water causes scale build-up on plumbing fixtures and stains on the washed clothes or washed dishes.
4. In hard water, soap, shampoo and washing powder do not foam well.
5. Hard water tightens and dries your skin, damages blood vessels, causes dandruff, hair loss and kidney stone disease.

Water softening methods

Water softening means that hardness salts are removed.

• Boiling. The easiest and cheapest way to soften water. However, it leads to the formation of stubborn limescale.
• Liming. An affordable way to remove hardness salts by adding lime to water from a well or a groundwater well. As a result, the water gets a bit softer, but is still not suitable for drinking or washing.
• Magnetic and electromagnetic water softeners. They remove calcium and magnesium salts by exposure to magnetic or electromagnetic field. The disadvantage of such systems is that their efficiency strongly depends on the water temperature and flow rate.
• Household filters. The basic technology here is ion exchange. Filters contain ion exchange resin that replaces calcium and magnesium ions with sodium ions. Over time, the resin exchange efficiency decreases, and then it must be recovered with regular table salt.

Water in the filter passes through a semipermeable membrane that cuts off all impurities larger than 0.0005 microns: hardness salts, bacteria, viruses and other contaminants.

This cleaning and softening process is the most extensive among those described above, but it takes a lot of time and therefore pure water needs to be collected in a large storage tank.