How Hard Water Affects Your Home and Health

The majority of Americans are getting hard water from their taps. However, just because it’s common doesn’t mean that it’s healthy, safe, or desirable. In this blog, let’s talk more about what exactly hard water is, why you probably don’t want to consume (or bathe in) it, and what you can do to soften your drinking water at home.

What is Hard Water?

The hardness of water depends on how much dissolved calcium and magnesium it contains. There might be other minerals involved—such as aluminum, barium, iron, zinc, manganese, and strontium—but these two are the main ones. The mineral content of your water isn’t something you can tell just by looking, but you still know when you’re exposed to hard water. Your glasses might be spotty, your skin might feel dirty even after you’ve washed, or your shower curtain could be “scummy.”

While these are indications that you’re dealing with hard water, there is a scale that measures water hardness:

• <75 mg/L: Soft water

• 76-150 mg/L: Moderately hard water

• 151-300 mg/L: Hard water

• >300 mg/L: Very hard water

If you’re curious about your water hardness at home, you can find testing strips online.

Now, you might hear about water that contains calcium and magnesium and think, “Wait a minute, those are good for you!” You might even take supplements to get more of these minerals. Why, then, is it a bad thing for your home to have hard water?

Is Hard Water Dangerous to Our Health?

We can’t automatically say that it’s “dangerous” because every home can supply water with slightly (or vastly) different components. However, very hard water certainly isn’t desirable, at the very least.

Let’s start with the more pesky, albeit still aggravating, repercussions. Hard water can dry out your skin and hair. You might experience a dry, flaky scalp. It can also change the pH balance of your skin. When this happens, you’re more susceptible to the threat of bacteria and infections.

 

If you already have hair or skin issues—like acne, eczema, or hair loss—hard water could be even more problematic.

There could be other adverse effects of consuming hard water, though. Ideally, your plumbing system, whether it’s public or private, filters out minerals and other contaminants. However, if you have hard water, that could mean there are other pollutants in your tap water that you just don’t know about, like hormones, fertilizers, pesticides, fluoride, microplastics, lead, nitrate, chromium, and pathogens like viruses and bacteria.

In other words, if even one contaminant is present in your tap water, then there’s a good chance other contaminants are lurking, too. And those contaminants can cause all sorts of health problems. 

If you have hard water, it hasn’t been purified, period.

How to Get Rid of Hard Water at Home

So, you’ve tested your water at home, or maybe you can tell simply by looking at your dishware that there must be a lot of calcium and magnesium coming from your tap.

Now what?

Well, one option is to install a water softener in your home. You can install one for your kitchen sink only, or you can purchase a whole-home water softener so that it softens the water in your bathrooms, too. But there are a few downsides here.

First, this can be expensive, particularly if you have to pay for the installation. Money aside, this doesn’t resolve the bigger problem at hand: You have contaminated drinking water. If you want to drink cleaner water, then a water softener isn’t going to be an adequate solution.

Rather, water filtration is what you need.

How Does Water Purification Work?

There are different types of water filters. Maybe you have one built into your refrigerator water dispenser, or perhaps you attached one to your faucet, and it cleans the water as it comes out. However, unless these purifiers utilize reverse osmosis (RO) filtration, they’re still leaving contaminants behind, and refrigerator, pitcher and faucet filters are typically just carbon filters. 

Reverse osmosis is the latest and most powerful water filtration technology. We use a four-layer RO filtration system that removes impurities down to 0.0001 microns in size. Additionally, we combine this with UV-C purification as the ultimate defense against pathogens that can make you sick.

The Sans filtration system removes more than 99.9% of fluoride, more than 98.8% of forever chemicals (PFOA and PFOS), 99.3% of lead, 98.6% of chromium, 99.9% of microplastics, and more than 99.9% of nitrates from your drinking water. In other words, just about the only thing that gets through our filters is water molecules!

Should this be something that your plumbing system already does? Technically, yes. Public water systems are responsible for ensuring your drinking water is clean. However, they’re flawed. For instance, consider the fact that cities add chlorine to their water to clean it, since water might travel miles and miles through old, dirty pipes. 

This means that the water coming out of your tap contains chlorine! (That could be one reason why your tap water tastes funny.)

If your water comes from a private well on your property, you’ve got a double-edged sword on your hands. Yes, you have more control over your water, but this also means that you alone are responsible for it—meaning testing and treating it.

Why Sans?

Besides its unparalleled filtration process, Sans instantly dispenses hot water and automatically refills. The countertop design requires no installation, and it comes with a removable glass pitcher. Sans will alert you when it’s time to change the filter, and it’s built with a real-time water quality monitor.

For fresh water on the go, opt for our self-cleaning water bottle. It keeps water hot for 12 hours and cold for 24 hours, and it utilizes UV-C light purification.