Which water purifier is best for hard water?

Are your clothes looking dull and feel rough to touch? Do you have scale build-up on faucets? Are you experiencing low water pressure from showers? Are you seeing white residue on washed utensils and metallic stains on your bathroom fixtures? Is your hair getting rougher or your skin getting itchier? Then, chances are high that water supplied to your home is hard water.

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What is hard water and how to identify it easily?

According to Wikipedia, hard water is water that has high mineral content. Hard water is formed when water percolates through deposits of limestone, chalk, or gypsum which are largely made up of calcium and magnesium carbonates, bicarbonates, and sulfates. When the water supply of your home has a high total Dissolved Solids quotient, it is considered hard water. An easy way to identify if your water supply is hard water is to see if your soap lathers easily with the water. Soap doesn’t lather well with hard water.

What is the difference between TDS and hardness?

Most sources of research talk about TDS in the same breath as hard water. However, both are totally different. Though it is probably true that water with high TDS is usually hard water as well, even soft water can sometimes indicate a high TDS value on your TDS meter. While TDS include inorganic and organic substances that cannot be filtered through a filter paper, hardness is due to the presence of magnesium and calcium salts of carbonate, sulfate, and chloride.

How to treat the hardness of your water?

When the water supply in your home has hard water in it, for the purpose of your home, you need a water softener to soften the water so you can just drop a tablet of softener into your water tank. Water softening is usually achieved using lime softening or ion-exchange resins.

Lime softening (lime buttering) or lime-soda treatment also known as Clark’s process, is a type of water treatment used for water softening that uses the addition of limewater (calcium hydroxide) to remove hardness (calcium and magnesium ions) by precipitation. Conventional water-softening appliances intended for household use depend on an ion-exchange resin in which “hardness ions”—mainly Ca²⁺ and Mg²⁺—are exchanged for sodium ions. Ion-exchange devices reduce the hardness by replacing magnesium and calcium (Mg²⁺ and Ca²⁺) with sodium or potassium ions (Na⁺ and K⁺).

But for drinking water, you need to get yourself a water purifier based on the TDS of your water feed.

Which water purifier should you choose?

Municipality water TDS averages around 200 ppm

Groundwater TDS ranges between 200 to 500 ppm

Borewell water TDS is usually more than 500 ppm

If the TDS quotient is lower than 200 ppm, you can choose UV (Ultra-Violet) filtration technology which can remove impurities while retaining key minerals, if the turbidity of your water permits. For a TDS quotient between 200-500 ppm, you can opt for a Pureit Mineral RO + UV device, that can add the essential minerals back to the water stream. If your TDS quotient is over 500 ppm, an RO water purifier is a must and not merely a choice.

Do you believe that hard water by itself is not a case for a water purifier according to the WHO? In fact, this body considers hard water to be a mineral supplement.

As reverse osmosis eliminates up to 95% of total dissolved solids, it cannot really tell the good minerals from the contaminants. So along with the contaminants, the good minerals are also eliminated. So, opt for an RO purifier with a TDS modulator that reduces the RO effect or one that has a mineralizer cartridge that helps infuse fresh ions into the water stream.

Then, you need to consider if there is microbial contamination in your water supply as well. Though RO removes microbial contaminants, it is not 100% effective. In that case, opt for an RO purifier that combines the RO module with a UV module. UV technology has the ability to kill the microbes and prevent them from multiplying, thus proving to be effective against 99% of the microbial contaminants. However, note that UV technology is only effective when the turbidity of your water is low as otherwise, it might cause the UV radiation to scatter. So, if the water is less muddy, RO + UV will work just fine for you. Read on to find out which water purifier is best for home.