Ever wondered why water is so hard in Fontwell? This is why.

Living in Fontwell means you are continually faced with hard water coming through your taps. Don’t blame the rainfall – rainwater is actually soft by nature. It’s what goes on underground that’s the major culprit!

Like much of West Sussex, Fontwell sits on mainly porous, chalky soil, which is abundant with calcium and magnesium minerals. Whenever rainfall gets into the underlay, these minerals have the effect of turning the naturally soft water hard.

Whilst hard water isn’t dangerous to use, it does have loads of downsides. For starters, it dries out skin and hair, as well as the laundry. Kiss goodbye to lather with hard water, too! The result is you end up spending far more than necessary on shampoos, gels and detergents.

But there’s worse to come! Hard water is the prime cause of limescale. Maintaining shiny kitchen and bathroom surfaces is virtually impossible because scale keeps reappearing. Worse still, your central heating system will suffer the biggest consequences.
A brand-new boiler and water tank will collect alarming amounts of scale – within just a few months. It collects all around the pipework, meaning you have to heat the scale before the hot water – which is ridiculous. The water tank capacity is gradually diminished because great chunks of scale congest where the water should be stored.
This is costly because you are throwing money away on needless energy use. Plus, the lifespan of the boiler itself could be reduced from around 15 years to just seven – before you could be facing an expensive replacement.
Water softeners immediately solve all these problems. After your initial investment, you’ll benefit from thousands of pounds of savings on energy costs and repair bills. And you’ll spend less on cleaning products. See sense with softened water!
In Fontwell, the water hardness level is measured at around 270 parts per million (ppm). A reading above 200ppm is deemed to be hard – so at 270 ppm Fontwell’s reading is pretty high! A water from Scott Jenkins would bring that level down to zero.

Fontwell – an Overview

Annual rainfall: 29.76 inch or 755.90mm

With a population of approximately 9000, Fontwell is an electoral division in West Sussex – covering the villages of Aldingbourne, Barnham, Binsted, Eastergate, Fontwell Village, Madehurst, Slindom Walberton and Westergate.

Fontwell is best known as the venue for Fontwell Park Racecourse, a national hunt track, unusual for its figure of eight-shaped steeplechase course. The course was established by Alfred Day, who trained racehorses at The Hermitage, next to the main Chichester to Arundel Road, as far back as 1887. The first meeting took place in May 1924. In 1949, the then Princess Elizabeth (Queen Elizabeth II) had her first winner as an owner at Fontwell.