Also known as a harder water headache, hard water is a form of water source where the water  has a high mineral content. This is the opposite of soft water. When hard water is heated, it typically leaves deposits of limestone and chalk, which can be seen in many forms in the home.

What happens when laundry is done right with hard water?

1. If you aren’t doing anything to prevent hard water while doing laundry, you’ll probably experience stiffness in your clothes as well as a harshness to the material.
2. Hard water may also affect the energy and water efficiency of your washing machine.
3. Hard water may also shorten the lifespan of electrical circuits of a washing machine.

Unfortunately, not everyone knows that they have hard water and they may often wonder if their machines are broken. But that’s generally not the case.

Hard water and laundry

When doing laundry in hard water, we often have to use more detergent. This is because generally, the detergent is used up by trying to soften calcium and magnesium. Since these two are more present with hard water, more detergent is required when doing laundry.

How to deal with hard water

Hard water can be treated, albeit it is a bit more difficult to work with. For starters, you can use a water softener, which is like a filter and dilutes the amount of minerals coming through. Water softeners such as the EWT 610 Gold HE high-efficiency water softener can remove limescale from your water, is salt efficient and is energy efficient too. If this isn’t within your budget, there are other inexpensive options that work just as well like the EWT MODEL EWT500 Gold. While being cheaper, it’s still highly energy efficient while removing limescale and softening the water completely in your home or workplace.

If you don’t have access to either of these options, there are few DIY solutions that can reduce the amount of minerals in your water, to make it a softer or help when doing laundry.

• Make sure to use an adequate amount of detergent – Those who have worked with laundry and hot water are probably already familiar with the trick of adding more detergent and water when doing laundry. But this can be quite the headache and cost a considerable amount of money without actually solving the route cause.

 

• While home water softeners are great and can reduce the amount of hardness the water has during laundry, cold water can present an issue. If the hardness of your water is higher than 150 ppm, a water conditioner should be installed to make the laundry experience a lot easier.