The Salt Free Water Softener Experiment

Wow - that was a long time between blogs - guess you could say I'm a bit embarrassed, but well, that's life I guess.  A bunch of stuff has gone on since I last posted including a two week trip to British Columbia (that was SOOOOOO incredible), a full week of water conferences, and well, a tonne of work!  Right, right, but my personal life is not of interest (nor very exciting I suppose), you want to know what's been going on with our soft water.

Well, its been a bit of a rollercoaster ride - but I think, in the end a good one and definitely a good opportunity for learning.  A few weeks back we noticed (and I think I posted) that there was not much movement on the toilet progress.  Then in fact things seemed to almost get worse - back to the yucky yellow scale in the entire toilet bowl that could only be removed by lots of vinegar.  So we contacted Reid and tried to understand what was going on....after some phone calls to those in the know, we have determined that there is very likely quite a large amount of scale in our system (100 year old house, Region of Waterloo on 100% groundwater....) and it will likely get worse before it gets better.  We could be looking at 90 days to see all the scale removed.

Sidenote - we had noticed a bit of a new taste in the water, sort of metallic tasting - so we retrofit our existing under the sink filter (I believe its a carbon filter and a ceramic filter in series....Reid?) and voila, taste was gone.  I haven't noticed the taste at all in several weeks, I suspect the taste is gone from the main tap too (mental note to taste the water tomorrow!).  Anyways, the taste seemed to indicate the same thing, that our pipes are descaling.

So, all that fine and good, my academic brain (surprising based on my blogging, eh?) felt satisfied and ready to wait 90 days.  Then bammo - the toilet was clean.  And I didn't clean it.  This probably happened about a week and a half ago now and has stayed clean.  I took a photo tonite (to be honest I think I should have given it a clean first - but oh well, my dirty laundry (toilet really) so to speak is already fully exposed....) so you can see for yourself.

The kettle has been sloughing a tonne of scale but doesn't really look different to me inside.

Hmmm, it doesn't really look that good in the photo.....but it is a HUGE difference over a couple of weeks ago.

Okay - for reference, here is where I said it was "clean" back in early October and look at how much of the nasty dark yellow scale has come off!

All this blogging is making me sleepy, more later.