This doesn’t happen very often – but when it does it can be a bit off putting!
We were recently contacted by a customer who bought an upgraded water softener from us, replacing an existing softener that was supplied elsewhere.
The picture (below) is of the inside of the customer’s kettle after our installation, which appears to show bits of muck that have suddenly shown up from nowhere. He also reported that there was a slight taste in the drinking water, which hadn’t been detected when the previous softener was in operation.
In actual fact, looking at the picture, it’s proof that the new water softener is really doing its job! The gubbins floating around in the water is evidence of scale which has been dissolved by the soft water. You may experience something similar after you’ve upgraded your water softener, especially if the old softener has been out of action for a while or under-performing. And if you are a first-time user of a water softener, this may also happen, especially if your appliances have been subjected to years of nothing but hard water.
Either way, if pieces of unsightly scale are showing up in your kettle which coincide with the installation of your new water softener, it’s nothing to be alarmed about. It actually means that your kettle is freeing itself from limescale and well on the road to recovery!
If you’d rather not wait for all the scale to clear naturally, we recommend that you thoroughly rinse out your kettle before use, or descale it completely there and then.
How to restore great-tasting drinking water
If you find your drinking water appears to have developed a slightly funny taste, again, this may be because the old softener wasn’t functioning as it should have done and you were drinking either hard water, or a mixture of hard and soft water. Softened water can taste very different to hard water; this is because the calcium and magnesium minerals (which cause hard, scaley water) is removed from the equation when you have softened water.
It’s really down to what you prefer. Some people opt for drinking hard water, whilst others are happy sticking with soft.
If after a while with your new water softener in use, you aren’t too keen on the taste of the water, there are a couple of options available to you:
- By-pass the softener and fill jugs and bottles with hard water for drinking. Then put the softener back into service for all other purposes.
- Instead of by-passing the softener each time you want to have drinking water, we can install a drinking water filter tap in your kitchen which produces only hard water.
- Purchase a Reverse Osmosis system (RO) This will provide the purest option of all. RO efficiently filters out all the impurities in the water but puts the calcium and magnesium minerals back into the water.
If you are considering introducing a soft water system into your home, SJ Water Softeners are one of the leading sales and service providers in the south of England of high quality water softeners and filtered drinking water products. We cover the counties of West Sussex, East Sussex, Hampshire, Surrey, as well as London and parts of Kent. For all enquiries, call SJ Water Softeners on 01243 607494 or via email: scott@sjbs.info