If you live on Hayling Island, your mains water will be very hard.

Like so much of the south-east – and especially the coastal areas of Hampshire and East and West Sussex – hard water is the order of the day. It’s got nothing to do with the type of rain. In fact, rainwater is soft by nature. The issue is the consistency of the soil beneath our feet.

Hayling Island is no exception. It sits on predominantly chalky soil, which is full of calcium and magnesium minerals. Whenever it rains and the water finds its way into the underlay, these minerals have the effect of changing the water from soft to hard.

For Hayling Island homeowners who don’t like having hard water all the time, the wise decision is to have a water softener fitted in your property. You’ll soon see the benefits! For a kick off, skin and hair love softened water! It ensures they stay naturally shiny and vibrant looking. Laundry, too, feels much softer to the touch when soft water is flowing through the washing machine.

Hard water is also the chief instigator of limescale. The great news is that a water softener will prevent scale from accumulating in your household appliances – like dishwashers, kettles and washing machines. Cleaning kitchens and bathrooms also becomes much more straightforward – requiring less elbow grease and less expense. That’s because surfaces remain shinier for longer and use up far less detergents. Equally, your hard-earned money will also stretch further with soft water coursing through your central heating system. Pipework doesn’t collect any scale, meaning you use less energy to heat your home and provide hot water. With energy bills soaring, that’s good news!

Hayling Island registers 286 parts per million (ppm) on the water hardness scale. With any reading over 200ppm considered hard, this means Hayling Island is way up the charts when it comes to water hardness levels.

Hayling Island – an Overview

Annual rainfall: 24.96inch or 633.98mm.

Hayling Island is a true island off the Hampshire coast of England, in the borough of Havant, just east of Portsmouth. At the 2011 census, the population stood at 17,379.

Hayling is shaped like an inverted T, about 4 miles long and 4 miles wide, and connected by a road bridge to the English mainland at Langstone. A pedestrian ferry connects to the Eastney area of Portsmouth on neighbouring Portsea Island.

The natural beach at Hayling was predominantly sandy, but in recent years it has been mechanically topped with shingle, dredged from the Solent bed, reducing beach erosion and flood potential. Oysters have been fished on the Hayling oyster beds since Roman times.