The mains water supply in Ferring is hard. But it doesn’t have to be!

Like so many areas of West Sussex, if you live in Ferring, hard water is just a way of life. It’s nothing to with rainwater – which is naturally soft. The issue is the soil under our feet.

Ferring lies on mainly chalky soil that contains an abundance of calcium and magnesium minerals. Once the rainwater reaches this chalky underlay, the calcium and magnesium components get to work and turn the water from soft to hard.

If you are a Ferring homeowner and don’t much care for a constant flow of hard water, the wise decision would be to have a water softener installed. The benefits will be immediate! For a start, skin and hair adore softened water, keeping them naturally soft, shiny and vibrant looking. Likewise, laundry feels so much softer to the touch once soft water is flowing through your washing machine.

Hard water is also the major cause of limescale – a nightmare that never goes away, no matter how hard you try. Thankfully, water softeners are brilliant at eradicating scale, preventing it from accumulating in pipework and household appliances, like washing machines, dishwashers and kettles. They all work way better with soft water flowing through the system. And it’s so much easier to clean kitchens and bathrooms and less costly, since you won’t get through detergents as fast. Money also stretches further with soft water coursing through your boiler. This prevents it from clogging up with limescale, so that it stays substantially more energy efficient. Meanwhile, hard water dramatically downgrades heating systems. Not good news financially when your boiler packs up altogether!

Ferring’s water hardness reading is 282 parts per million (ppm). Since any measurement over 200ppm is considered hard, this places Ferring way up the water hardness scale.

Ferring – an Overview

Annual rainfall: 24.67inch or 626.62mm.

Ferring is a village in the Arun District of West Sussex, which is part of the built-up area of Worthing. It is reached via the A259 road, approximately 3 miles from Worthing town centre and includes North Down Farm and Highdown Hill to the north. East lies Goring-by-Sea with East Preston to the west.

At the 2011 census, Ferring’s population was recorded at 4480. The village started to take off as a holiday resort from the 1920s. Today, the area has a pedestrianised seafront and the beach itself is a mix of pebbles and shingle.

The village is charmingly ancient, with a Norman parish church which contains the ashes of Major John Bigelow Dodge, veteran of the Great Escape of 1944. There is also a Commonwealth war grave of a Royal Sussex Regiment officer of World War II.