Is Hard Water Bad For You?

Hard water may not be the easiest issue to spot — but once you know how to recognize the signs in your home, you may start to wonder what else it’s impacting. Could the high mineral content responsible for limescale, soap spots and reduced water pressure also affect your body?

The good news is that hard water generally isn’t a health concern. It may not be the best option to clean with, but you can usually drink it without worrying about safety. However, it can impact your well-being in other ways through negative effects on your hair, skin and nails.

To understand how hard water affects your body, home, budget and more, let’s take a closer look at the underlying causes and effects.

The Health Effects of Hard Water

Every problem hard water causes — from stubborn limescale to reduced water flow — can actually be traced back to certain kinds of minerals. However, it may surprise you to learn what they are.

That’s because the minerals that cause water hardness are mostly calcium and magnesium, which are present just about everywhere:

• Calcium: Essential to all living things, calcium is found in leaves, teeth, bones, shells and even the Earth’s crust.
• Magnesium: This mineral is also essential for plant and animal life, mostly in bones.

That’s right — these minerals are already in your body and can actually be beneficial to some parts of your health. That’s why hard water isn’t generally considered dangerous.

However, that doesn’t mean water hardness is a good thing. The truth is that most calcium comes from your diet, particularly milk products; both calcium and magnesium can also be found in green leafy vegetables, nuts and seeds. That means you don’t need to rely on your drinking water as a main source of these minerals — especially because they can cause an unpleasant taste. Unfortunately, that’s not all you can expect from high levels of hardness minerals.

Calcium and magnesium tend to coat, leaving a film behind and reducing moisture. This can impact the well-being of your hair, skin and nails.

Hard water residue can remain on hair follicles, meaning your hair may not feel cleaner after washes and can become stiff, limp or frizzy. Your skin is subject to the same hard water effects, as the combination of hard water and soap tends to block skin pores and not completely rinse off. This can be irritating to the skin, causing itching, a rash or redness for people with sensitive skin. The blocked pores also prevent natural body oils from reaching the skin’s surface.

The Home Effects of Hard Water

It’s good to know that bathing with or drinking hard water isn’t a direct risk to human health, although it can lead to other frustrating issues like dry skin or dull, flat hair. However, dissolved minerals in your tap water can have a big impact on something else — and that’s your home.

The problem is that hard water is difficult to spot in the water itself. You can’t see or smell it, and while it sometimes has an unpleasant taste, you may not realize what’s causing it. In fact, you might have been dealing with hard water in your home for years and have not known.

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Unfortunately, most hard water symptoms get worse over time. That’s because the responsible minerals stick together and lead to stubborn issues like these:

Visible Mineral Buildup

Water lives in lots of places throughout your home, touching faucets, sinks, showerheads, bathtubs and more. That means all of these places can have hard water deposits, sometimes called limescale or hard water buildup. This unpleasant, scaly substance is difficult to clean and comes back over time, demanding a lot of money and effort in scrubbing.

Invisible Mineral Buildup

Although you may not be able to see it, hard water is unkind to your plumbing — and constant mineral exposure can create buildup. If left untreated, these deposits can clog drains, decrease your water quality and even cause problems with your pipes.

Spotty Dishes and Glass

Even after being thoroughly washed, dishes and silverware may still have a white film or spots. This happens when the excess minerals in hard water stay on your dishes after drying — and that leaves you with extra cleaning to remove the residue.

Stubborn Residue

Hard water that dries on the shower door, countertop or sink will leave an unpleasant residue. It tends to be white, flaky and difficult to remove.

Reduced Appliance Efficiency and Lifetime

Water hardness also affects the pipes and valves in your refrigerator, water heater, washing machine and dishwasher. Hard water buildup can clog your appliances, decreasing their effectiveness and potentially leading to expensive replacement and repairs. In fact, shifting from hard to soft water can increase the lifespan of your tank water heater by 33% and your washing machine by 50%.

Cleaning Challenges

Hard water also keeps your soaps and detergents from working as effectively. That’s because minerals in hard water react with cleaners. If you’ve noticed you need a lot of soap to create lather, more detergent to get your clothes clean or more supplies to handle increased stains, chances are your home has hard water. With soft water, you could use 50% less detergent for laundry and nearly a third less soap and shampoo in the shower.

Beating Hard Water: What To Know

If you’re ready to say goodbye to hard water stains and other issues, you need to learn how to approach this problem. Here are a few topics to focus on:

Understanding Water Hardness

Before you can choose the right water treatment solution for hardness, you should understand what causes the issue in the first place.

Your water supply has a long journey from origin to tap. Along the way, it can collect minerals from rocks and soil. Because it doesn’t have a negative health impact, these hardness minerals are not typically addressed as part of municipal water treatment centers – and hard water is a common issue for private wells, too.

How To Measure Water Hardness

The good news is that you don’t have to know how to measure water hardness on your own. This can get complicated, as there are different scales and units of measurement — and mistakes can be a big problem, because this determines what solution will work in your home.

Professional water testing handles all of this and more. Your local Culligan water expert will test your tap water for hardness and other common contaminants — all for free and typically with results in less than 30 minutes. You’ll get all the information you need about hardness levels and how this impacts your water treatment choices.

How Water Softeners Work

Water softeners are a top solution for any hard water problem. They act like traps, attracting and holding mineral content while the rest of your water flows out of the system and through your home. When the “trap” is full, the softener performs a process called regeneration, in which a sodium solution flushes out the mineral content.

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How does your water’s hardness level fit into all of this? It comes down to what the water softener is designed to handle. Harder water has more mineral content, which means the system needs to work harder to trap and flush it out — which is why you need to choose your softener accordingly.

What To Expect From Water Softening

Once your water softener is up and running, you’ll start enjoying soft water almost immediately. That leads to all kinds of benefits, including:

Easier cleaning: You won’t be adding new mineral content to the hard water buildup every time you try to clean it, which means you’ll actually be able to scrub it away (and spend less time doing it).
Healthier hair, skin and nails: Your body’s natural processes will pick back up and your hair, skin and nails will all have an easier time retaining healthy moisture.
Better budgets: You won’t have to spend money on extra cleaning supplies, replacements for your water-using appliances or lotions and conditioners for dry hair and skin.

With just a little bit of maintenance, your water softener can keep creating these benefits and more for years to come.

Soft Water Without the Hassle

Now that you know what hard water is, what it does and why it’s a problem even if it’s not a health risk, it’s time to start softening. All you have to do is discover your water’s hardness levels with stress-free water testing, and you’ll be on the path to improved well-being and a cleaner home.

Get started today by scheduling your free, in-home water test and consultation.